///// Bot

The Backwatch bot

If you found this URL in your logs, someone ran Backwatch against your site. Backwatch checks how AI agents see a site: whether they can read it, find its MCP server, sign in and find it in agent registries.

How to recognise it

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Backwatch/0.1; +https://backwatch.dev/bot)

Backwatch always sends this User-Agent. It never retries in disguise, even when it is blocked. If your site blocks it, the report says so. A site that blocks automated agents is something its owner usually wants to know.

The AI-bot checks add the crawler's name, so your robots.txt and firewall rules for bots such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot are tested, while the request still says it is Backwatch:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GPTBot/1.0; via Backwatch/0.1; +https://backwatch.dev/bot)

Those requests come from the same machine as the rest of the scan, not from the AI companies. The site owner can also choose a different User-Agent with --user-agent when testing their own site.

What it is not

Backwatch is not a crawler. It does not follow links across the web, build an index or train models. It runs only when a person starts a scan, from their own machine or their own CI, so there are no fixed IP addresses.

What it requests

A scan is small and bounded: at most 100 requests to at most 12 hosts, 10 content pages and 3 minutes. Typically:

the home page and a few linked pages, also with Accept: text/markdown
robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt and files linked from them
/.well-known/ discovery files (MCP, OAuth, API catalogues)
published API descriptions such as OpenAPI documents
one request to a path that does not exist, to see the 404 an agent gets
MCP and API endpoints without credentials, to read their sign-in challenge

It sends no credentials, submits no forms and makes no requests that change data. It does not register OAuth clients unless the owner of the server passes --register for their own server.

Backwatch reads robots.txt to report on it. Because a person starts each scan on demand, it does not obey Disallow rules, the same way other user-triggered fetchers work.

To block it

Match Backwatch in the User-Agent and return 403. The person who ran the scan will see “blocks automated agents” in their report.

Contact

To be added before launch.