Skip to main content
Can AI see it

Know what AI sees. Measure what it's worth.

What is LinkCheck?

Direct Answer: Siteimprove's LinkCheck crawler analyzes websites for quality assurance, SEO, and accessibility purposes.

Operator: SiteImprove Type: SEO Tool Purpose: SEO and accessibility auditing, quality assurance, and website content monitoring

The Siteimprove LinkCheck crawler is a computer program that scans websites, identifies hyperlinks, and follows them to collect HTML code for error checks. It analyzes and monitors websites for quality assurance, SEO, and accessibility purposes, and keeps website content in line with brand guidelines and organizational policies.

User-Agent Identification

The following user-agent strings identify LinkCheck in your live traffic data:

  • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) LinkCheck by Siteimprove

robots.txt Rules for LinkCheck

Respects robots.txt: No

This bot does not commit to following robots.txt

LinkCheck does not officially follow robots.txt directives. The only reliable way to control access is through server-side blocking (IP filtering, user-agent rules in your web server config) combined with log monitoring to verify effectiveness.

Need continuous verification across 500+ bots? Can AI See It automates this.

Crawl Behavior

Frequency:Not Documented

Request Pattern:Not Documented

Official Documentation Quotes

"Our crawlers scan your website using Siteimprove servers from specific IP addresses with identifiable user agents."

Crawl Activity Index

Relative crawl activity for LinkCheck 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 88.0
Mar 27, 2026 82.7
Mar 28, 2026 83.1
Mar 29, 2026 81.8
Mar 30, 2026 87.3
Mar 31, 2026 90.2
Apr 1, 2026 88.9

Source: Cloudflare Radar

Why track LinkCheck traffic?

Control third-party crawl impact on your server. LinkCheck crawls your site to build SiteImprove's SEO database. While useful for competitive analysis, these crawlers can consume significant server resources on large sites.

Identify who's analyzing your site. LinkCheck visits reveal when competitors or agencies are running audits on your domain.

Manage crawl priority. If LinkCheck is consuming crawl budget you'd rather allocate to search engines, you can throttle or block it based on measured volume.

Surface 4XX and 5XX errors before search engines find them. If LinkCheck reports broken pages or server errors in its crawl data, you can fix those issues proactively — before search engine crawlers encounter them and your rankings suffer.

Is LinkCheck worth the server resources?

LinkCheck crawls your site to build SiteImprove's SEO database. Unlike search engines, this crawler doesn't send you any referral traffic — it feeds a third-party tool.

That's not necessarily a problem — SiteImprove's data may power tools you use yourself. The question is whether LinkCheck's crawl volume is proportionate to its value.

What Can AI See It measures

Crawl volume

Requests per day and bandwidth consumed by LinkCheck

Resource share

What % of your total bot traffic is LinkCheck?

Fake bot detection

Scrapers spoofing LinkCheck's user-agent string

Log Verification

To verify LinkCheck traffic in your live traffic data:

  1. Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
  2. Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by SiteImprove)
  3. Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
  4. Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available

IP Verification: SiteImprove provides official IP verification via Published IP ranges. View verification instructions →

Siteimprove crawlers scan websites using Siteimprove servers from specific IP addresses with identifiable user agents.

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 LinkCheck:

  • crawl frequency
  • request pattern
  • JavaScript rendering details

See which SEO tools are crawling your site — and how much they cost you

  • Identify third-party crawlers consuming your server resources
  • Separate SEO tool traffic from search engine crawls
  • Detect fake bots spoofing LinkCheck's user-agent
Start measuring for free → See how it works →

Official Documentation

View Official LinkCheck Documentation →

Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.