AftercheckScan
AftercheckScan is the scanner behind Aftercheck's free WooCommerce store scan. It runs only when someone asks for a scan of a store, and it behaves like one visitor:
- it opens the home page, the shop and one product in stock (for a product with choices, it picks one option, such as a size);
- it adds that product to the cart with the store's own button, or through the store's own cart when the page uses a button it does not know;
- it opens the cart and the checkout and looks at the payment options, then the same checkout on a phone-sized screen.
It never fills in payment details, never places an order, and never tries to get past a firewall or a CAPTCHA. It never uses the last piece of anything: a product or option with only one left is passed over, so it stays for a real customer. A scan usually takes less than a minute and opens a handful of pages.
It also notes what any visitor can see: how long pages take to show, whether search engines are told to stay away, the software versions a store gives away in its pages, and links to its policies.
It names itself in its user agent: AftercheckScan/1.0.
Opting out
To ask AftercheckScan not to scan your store, add these lines to your store's robots.txt:
User-agent: AftercheckScan Disallow: /
The scanner reads robots.txt before every scan and follows only the rules that name AftercheckScan. Rules written for every crawler (User-agent: *) are not applied to it, because many stores keep all crawlers out of the cart and checkout, and those are the pages a scan has to open. You can also keep it out of single pages, for example Disallow: /checkout/in the AftercheckScan group; the result then says which page it was asked not to open.