Meet SeoSwiftBot

Who our crawler is, why it visits, how to verify it — and how to slow or stop it.

Seeing SeoSwiftBot in your server logs? This page is for you — whether you're a SeoSwift customer or the operator of a site one of our customers monitors. Here's exactly who the bot is, why it's there, and every lever you have over it. The canonical, always-current version lives at seoswift.io/bot — the page the bot's own user-agent links to.

Who is knocking

SeoSwiftBot is the crawler behind SeoSwift, an SEO monitoring service. It visits a site because a SeoSwift customer asked us to monitor it — and every customer confirms, when adding a site, that they own or operate it or have the owner's permission to audit it. The bot reads public pages and their metadata, exactly like a browser would. It is strictly read-only: it never logs in, never submits forms, and never changes anything.

It obeys your robots.txt

SeoSwiftBot fetches and honours your robots.txt on every crawl, by default, always. Pages your rules disallow are simply skipped — and shown to the customer as robots-blocked, so nobody wonders where they went. A Disallow: / rule for the SeoSwiftBot token stops page crawling entirely (the front page is still probed once per scheduled crawl — email us for a full stop).

Verifying it's really us

Anyone can type a user-agent string, so don't trust the label — verify the source. SeoSwiftBot crawls only from a small set of static IPs, published (with their reverse-DNS names) at seoswift.io/bot/ips.json. The classic forward-confirmed reverse DNS check works too:

1. 1Take the visiting IP from your logs and do a reverse DNS lookup. A genuine SeoSwiftBot IP resolves to a hostname ending in crawl.seoswift.io.
2. 2Do a forward lookup on that hostname. It resolves back to the same IP.
3. 3If either step fails, it isn't us — block away with our blessing.

How politely it crawls

• About one request per second, one page at a time — never in parallel bursts.
• Respects HTTP 429 responses with automatic exponential backoff, honouring Retry-After.
• Read-only, as above — no logins, no form submissions, no writes.

Your levers

• Slow it down: SeoSwift customers can set the site's Crawl speed (site Settings) to one request every 3 or 6 seconds — see Sites & Crawling.
• Let it through: if a firewall or bot-protection is blocking it, allowlist the SeoSwiftBot user-agent or the published IPs.
• Stop it: customers remove the site from SeoSwift; site operators disallow SeoSwiftBot in robots.txt (honoured on the very next crawl), return 403 to the user-agent, or just email us.

Still stuck? Email hello@seoswift.io — a human reads it.