FocalScoreBot
FocalScoreBot is the scanner behind FocalScore, a website audit for small businesses. If you found it in your logs, someone asked us to check that site — a one-off scan on our homepage, or a scheduled re-scan a subscriber set up for it. It does not crawl the web on its own, and it does not visit a site nobody asked us about.
The user agent it sends
Every page our crawler fetches is requested as:
FocalScoreBot/0.1 (+https://focalscore.com/bot)
What it does on your site
- It reads your homepage and follows your own links to a small, capped number of pages (25 at most by default), one at a time with a short pause between them. It also checks whether the links it found still work, and asks for some standard addresses — files such as
robots.txtandsitemap.xml, and a made-up address to see how your site answers a page that doesn't exist. - It reads; it does not take part. No form is submitted, no account is made, nothing is logged into and nothing is ordered. On an online shop it may add one item to a cart that belongs only to its own throwaway browser session, through the shop's public cart API, and empties that cart again before it leaves. On a site with a search box it may type a search word into it.
- To check whether AI assistants can read your site, it also requests your homepage once under each of a few AI crawlers' published user agents, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot. Those requests come from us, not from those companies.
- Our free tools make a few requests of their own when someone runs one on a site: its
robots.txt, the page entered or the homepage, up to three sitemaps or IndexNow key files it names, and — for the AI crawler checker — that one page once under each of a few AI crawlers' published user agents. The robots.txt, page and key-file requests carry the user agent above. - Speed is measured by Google PageSpeed Insights, which fetches your page itself, under Google's own user agent rather than ours.
How to let it in
Bot protection often turns automated visitors away, and when it turns ours away the report can only describe the block page. To get a full scan, ask whoever runs your firewall or CDN to allow requests whose user agent contains FocalScoreBot — for example a Cloudflare WAF custom rule with the Skip action, or an allow rule in Akamai or your hosting firewall — then scan again.
Some protection judges a visitor by its IP address's reputation as well as by its user agent, so an allow rule on the user agent is not always enough. If your site still blocks us, email info@focalscore.com and we'll help you get a full scan.
How to keep it out
FocalScoreBot reads your robots.txt before it crawls, and it will not crawl pages under paths your User-agent: * group disallows. Three limits, so you are not surprised: it reads only that wildcard group, not a group addressed to FocalScoreBot by name; it always fetches your homepage and the standard addresses above, because a scan someone asked for starts there; and a link it found on a page it did read may still get one quick request, to check the link isn't broken.
To keep it out entirely, block its user agent at your firewall or CDN. Questions about a visit you saw? Email info@focalscore.com.