TheStaccAuditBot

What it is

TheStaccAuditBot is the crawler theStacc uses to check websites for problems that stop them showing up in Google and in AI answers: pages that tell Google to stay away, broken links, missing sitemaps, a site that loads at two addresses, and similar issues.

It only visits a site because the owner of that site, a theStacc customer, connected it to their account. We do not crawl the wider web, and we do not collect content to train AI models.

How to recognise it

Every request from the crawler carries this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TheStaccAuditBot/1.0; +https://thestacc.com/bot)

Its name in robots.txt is TheStaccAuditBot. We do not hide or rotate this name. The two exceptions are described under Crawler access test.

All of its requests come from one IP address: 184.164.80.42. The same list is published as JSON at thestacc.com/bot/ips.json, and we update both if the address changes.

What it reads

Daily site check

For sites on a paid theStacc plan, once a day: the homepage at its https://, https://www. and http:// addresses, /robots.txt, /llms.txt and the sitemap. That is about ten requests a day.

Full audit

When the site owner runs an audit, and every week if they switch that on: up to 500 pages, found through the sitemap and the links on the site's own pages.

How it behaves

• One page at a time during an audit. It waits between requests: about 0.35 seconds to start, and longer when your server answers slowly, up to 20 seconds.
• A short daily check. The three homepage addresses are asked at the same moment, then robots.txt, llms.txt and the sitemap.
• Audits follow robots.txt. They obey the rules you write for TheStaccAuditBot, or the rules for all crawlers (User-agent: *) when you have none for it.
• Public pages only. It does not sign in, submit forms, add to carts or leave comments.
• It stops on its own. An audit stops reading pages after 500 pages or 15 minutes, whichever comes first, and reads at most 5 MB from any one page.

Crawler access test

Owners often do not know that their firewall turns away search or AI crawlers. To show them, an audit requests the homepage and a few other pages twice with each of these user agents: a normal browser, Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, GPTBot and ClaudeBot.

These requests come from our servers, not from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity. A firewall that checks crawlers by their IP address will refuse them. That is expected, and it does not change how the real crawlers see your site.

An audit may also load up to five pages in a headless Chrome browser, to see content that only appears after JavaScript runs. Those requests use Chrome's own user agent.

Allow or block it

Block it

Add these lines to your robots.txt:

User-agent: TheStaccAuditBot
Disallow: /

Audits then stop reading your pages. A few homepage requests still run: the daily check, the homepage at each of its addresses, and the crawler access test above. To stop those too, email us.

Let it through a firewall

Allow requests whose user agent contains TheStaccAuditBot. On Cloudflare, go to Security, then WAF, then Custom rules, and create a rule with the action Skip for that user agent.

Contact

If the crawler causes a problem on your site, email hello@thestacc.com with your domain. A person will write back, usually within 24 hours.