The SiteGauge bot

SiteGauge watches web pages for changes on behalf of the people who own and track them. Here is exactly what our bot does, how to recognise it, and how to control its access to your site.

Our user-agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SiteGauge/1.0; +https://sitegauge.com/bot)

Every request SiteGauge makes carries this string. The +https://sitegauge.com/bot suffix links straight back to this page.

How we behave

We fetch only what we're asked to watch

SiteGauge requests the specific pages our customers add to a monitor, and nothing more. It does not crawl your site, follow links, build an index, or harvest content at scale. One monitored page means one page is checked.

Polite by design

Each check sends conditional requests (If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since) so an unchanged page is never re-downloaded. Checks run at the low frequency the customer chooses, and a full browser screenshot is only rendered when a change is actually detected.

Whole-domain mode reads your robots.txt

When a customer monitors a whole domain, we resolve your published sitemap and skip paths your robots.txt disallows. We use your sitemap as the source of truth for which pages exist.

Always identifiable

Every request carries the user-agent below, with a link back to this page. Because some sites block all datacenter traffic, a minority of checks are routed through residential networks, so the reliable way to recognise us is the user-agent string, not the IP address.

Controlling SiteGauge's access

If you would rather SiteGauge did not access your site, you have two options.

Block the bot in robots.txt (whole-site crawling)

To stop SiteGauge from discovering and enumerating pages across your domain, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: SiteGauge
Disallow: /
Ask us to stop (any page)

For a specific page, or if you have any concern about our traffic, email support@sitegauge.com from a domain you control and we will remove the relevant monitors. We aim to reply within one business day.

Questions about how SiteGauge works? Our privacy practices are set out in full in our policy.

Read our privacy policy