AskedlyBot

How to recognise it

Requests carry this user agent, followed by a link to the app’s address:

AskedlyBot/1.0 (+https://app.askedly.site)

The robots.txt token is AskedlyBot.

What it fetches, and why

• Stores that installed Askedly. For the merchant’s own checks (the GEO audit, product data checks, crawler access and, when the merchant switches it on, IndexNow submissions), it reads that store’s robots.txt and some of its public pages, such as the home page, policy pages and a small sample of product pages, to check things like whether the price and rating are in the page HTML.
• AI crawler check, on the merchant’s own store only. To show a merchant what AI crawlers receive, Askedly requests that merchant’s home page and a few product pages with the published user agents of the crawlers it checks (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Bingbot and Googlebot). It first reads the store’s robots.txt and skips any page it closes to AskedlyBot or to that crawler; when robots.txt cannot be read, it requests no pages at all and reports the check as not done. It never does this on a store whose owner did not install Askedly.

What it does not do

• It does not crawl the web, follow links across sites or build an index.
• It does not log in, submit forms or run JavaScript.
• It does not collect content to train AI models.
• On a store that installed Askedly, the AI crawler check follows the AskedlyBot rules in that store’s robots.txt. The other checks above (structured data, policy pages, llms.txt and IndexNow) run for that store’s owner: an AskedlyBot rule in that store’s robots.txt does not stop them, and uninstalling the app does.

Requests are few and paced per site.

How to block it

Add these lines to your robots.txt:

User-agent: AskedlyBot
Disallow: /

To block only part of your site, list those paths instead of /. A change applies within about 10 minutes: AskedlyBot keeps a copy of a site’s robots.txt for at most that long.

On Shopify, edit robots.txt through the robots.txt.liquid theme template. If you are a merchant using Askedly and want the checks to stop, uninstall the app.

Contact

Questions or problems: support@askedly.site