LinkWatchBot
If you've seen LinkWatchBot in your logs, here's what it is and how it behaves.
What it does
LinkWatchBot crawls websites whose owners have asked LinkWatch to monitor their affiliate links, and makes lightweight health checks against the product pages those links point to. It is read-only: it never submits forms, never executes purchases, and never follows affiliate redirector links (so it never inflates anyone's click counts).
How it behaves
- User-Agent:
LinkWatchBot/1.0 (+https://linkwatch.dev/bot) - Polite request rates with per-host budgets and backoff on 429/503.
- Range requests (first few KB) for health checks wherever possible — we don't download whole pages we don't need.
- Deduplicated targets: if a hundred customer pages link to the same product, we check that product once per cycle, not a hundred times.
- robots.txt is respected for merchant health checks where feasible.
- We do not store the full HTML of pages we check — links and metadata only.
Contact / blocking
Questions or complaints: [email protected]. To block us, disallow LinkWatchBot in robots.txt — we'll honour it for merchant checks. If we're scanning a site you own and you didn't ask us to, tell us and we'll stop and investigate: customers warrant that they control the sites they add.