EqualViaBot
EqualViaBot is the browser EqualVia uses to test web pages for accessibility problems. If you see it in your server logs, someone used EqualVia to check your site.
When it visits
- Someone ran a free scan of one of your pages, on equalvia.com or with our WordPress plugin: one page.
- A customer monitors the site in their EqualVia account: scheduled crawls of 10 to 1,000 pages depending on their plan, weekly to daily, and re-checks of up to 25 pages after they fix an issue.
- A developer checks pages from their CI pipeline: up to 10 addresses per check.
- Before we contact a business about accessibility, we may check its home page once, and only if robots.txt allows it.
What it does
It opens pages in a headless Chromium browser, like a visitor's browser would, runs accessibility tests on them and follows links within the same site and the pages its sitemap lists. A crawl loads one page at a time. On a few key pages of a crawl it also accepts the cookie banner, looks at the page at a phone's width and opens the search results for a word from the site, to test them as a visitor sees them. It doesn't log in, fill in or submit any other form, or buy anything.
Keeping it away
To keep our outreach checks away from your site, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: EqualViaBot Disallow: /
Scans that someone asks for on purpose (a free scan, a monitored site, a CI check) don't obey robots.txt, just as your browser doesn't when you open a page. A monitored site's crawl reads it only to find the sitemap, and scans the pages it disallows last.
A site's owner who has verified the site in their EqualVia account can let its scans use a regular Chrome user agent, for bot protection that turns EqualViaBot away. Those visits then don't carry the EqualViaBot name.
If you think your site is being scanned without your permission, email info@equalvia.com with the domain and we'll look into it.
Want to know what the tests check? See our accessibility statement.