ChatSEO Bot

What is ChatSEO?

ChatSEO is an AI-powered SEO assistant. It reads the pages of websites its users ask it to analyze, to help them improve their search rankings.

How to recognize the bot

Main user agent

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ChatSEO/1.0; +https://chatseo.app/bot)

Our other requests also contain ChatSEO in their user agent:

  • sitemap verification: ChatSEO (+https://chatseo.app/bot)
  • free tools: ChatSEO H1 Checker, ChatSEO Index Checker, ChatSEO Keyword Density Checker, ChatSEO Open Graph Checker, ChatSEO Readability Checker, each followed by the tool's link
  • preparing a Google Search Console inspection: ChatSEOBot/1.0 (+https://chatseo.app)

Cryptographic signature (Web Bot Auth) Our requests are signed with an Ed25519 key, following the Web Bot Auth protocol (HTTP Message Signatures). They carry the Signature, Signature-Input and Signature-Agent: "https://api.chatseo.app" headers. The public key is published here:

https://api.chatseo.app/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory

Our requests do not come from fixed IP addresses: the signature, not the IP, proves that a request comes from ChatSEO. A request that claims to be ChatSEO without a valid signature should not be trusted.

What the bot does

  • It loads a page in a headless browser: its HTML, text, title, meta description, canonical and hreflang tags, structured data, and the technologies it detects (CMS, frameworks, analytics).
  • It reads a site's robots.txt and XML sitemap.
  • It does not crawl a site link by link. It reads the URLs it needs: the ones the user provides, the ones in the sitemap, and the ones the assistant chooses to open to answer.

When the bot visits a site

  • When a user asks: when they ask the assistant about a page, or use one of our free tools.
  • When a user adds their site: we read its homepage, its sitemap and a few pages to describe the site and its tone of voice. We also read the homepage of a few competitors found in search results.
  • To verify a recommendation: when ChatSEO recommends a fix on a page, it comes back to check whether it was made, once a day, at most 15 times. These visits are automatic and only concern the user's own site.

What we keep

  • What the bot reads to answer a user stays in that user's conversation, and is deleted when they delete it.
  • When a user adds their site, we keep a profile of that site (title, description, technologies, tone of voice, competitors).
  • A verification keeps what it observed (HTTP status, observed value).
  • The robots.txt and the sitemap's URL list are cached for one hour.
  • We do not index or publish any of your content.

How to block ChatSEO

Add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: ChatSEO
Disallow: /

Or allow specific paths only:

User-agent: ChatSEO
Allow: /public/
Disallow: /

Without a ChatSEO group, we apply the rules of the User-agent: * group. These rules apply to page reads by the assistant, to the analysis of an added site and to automatic verifications. A disallowed URL is not requested. We read your robots.txt at most once an hour, so a change can take up to an hour to apply. If your robots.txt is missing or does not respond, we treat access as allowed.

Contact

Questions or concerns about our bot? Email us at [email protected].