What is PWABuilder?
Direct Answer: PWABuilder is a free, open-source tool from Microsoft that helps developers build progressive web apps.
PWABuilder is a developer tool from Microsoft that analyzes websites for Progressive Web App capabilities and helps publish them in app stores. It checks for a web manifest or service worker.
User-Agent Identification
The following user-agent strings identify PWABuilder in your live traffic data:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36 Edg/96.0.1054.57 PWABuilderHttpAgent
robots.txt Rules for PWABuilder
Respects robots.txt: Yes
Use the following robots.txt rules to control PWABuilder access:
# Block PWABuilder
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent
Disallow: /
# Allow PWABuilder
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent
Allow: /Robots.txt is a directive, not a barrier
Microsoft states that PWABuilder respects robots.txt. However, configuration mistakes, caching delays, and edge cases mean your directives may not always be followed as expected. Live traffic verification confirms whether PWABuilder actually obeys your rules in practice.
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Crawl Behavior
Frequency:Not Documented
Request Pattern:Not Documented
Official Documentation Quotes
"PWABuilder (pwabuilder.com) is a free, open source developer tool from Microsoft that helps developers build progressive web apps and publish them in app stores."
Crawl Activity Index
Relative crawl activity for PWABuilder over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.
View recent activity data (last 7 days)
| Date | Activity Index |
|---|---|
| Mar 26, 2026 | 0.0 |
| Mar 27, 2026 | 0.0 |
| Mar 28, 2026 | 0.0 |
| Mar 29, 2026 | 0.0 |
| Mar 30, 2026 | 0.0 |
| Mar 31, 2026 | 0.0 |
| Apr 1, 2026 | 0.0 |
Source: Cloudflare Radar
Why track PWABuilder traffic?
Identify and classify unknown crawler activity. PWABuilder may appear in your live traffic data with varying frequency. Tracking its behavior helps you decide whether to allow, throttle, or block it based on actual data.
Protect your crawl budget. Every bot request consumes server resources. Understanding what PWABuilder crawls helps you prioritize the crawlers that matter.
Log Verification
To verify PWABuilder traffic in your live traffic data:
- Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
- Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Microsoft)
- Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
- Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available
Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.
Undocumented Information
The following information is not officially documented for PWABuilder:
- crawl frequency
- request pattern
- IP verification method
- JavaScript rendering details
Official Documentation
View Official PWABuilder Documentation →
Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.