What is Watchbot?
Direct Answer: Watchbot is a monitoring bot operated by WatchBot, tracking website availability and SSL certificate expiration.
Watchbot is a website monitoring bot that alerts users to website downtime, domain name expiration, and SSL certificate expiration. It also monitors Certificate Transparency logs if enabled. The bot has been monitoring URLs since 2015.
User-Agent Identification
The following user-agent strings identify Watchbot in your live traffic data:
Watchbot monitoring robot (https://watchbot.fflow.net)
robots.txt Rules for Watchbot
Respects robots.txt: No
This bot does not commit to following robots.txt
Watchbot 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.
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Crawl Behavior
Frequency:Continuous
Request Pattern:Not Documented
Official Documentation Quotes
"The bot will alert you in case if your website is down, or your domain name or SSL certificate expires soon."
Crawl Activity Index
Relative crawl activity for Watchbot 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 28, 2026 | 9.1 |
| Mar 29, 2026 | 8.3 |
| Mar 30, 2026 | 8.0 |
| Mar 31, 2026 | 10.4 |
| Apr 1, 2026 | 8.9 |
| Apr 2, 2026 | 14.0 |
| Apr 3, 2026 | 19.7 |
Source: Cloudflare Radar
Why track Watchbot traffic?
Distinguish monitoring traffic from real crawler activity. Watchbot checks your site availability at regular intervals. Without proper identification, these requests can inflate your bot traffic metrics and distort crawl analysis.
Validate monitoring coverage. Track which pages Watchbot checks and how frequently, so your monitoring setup matches your infrastructure requirements.
Log Verification
To verify Watchbot 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 WatchBot)
- 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 Watchbot:
- crawl frequency details
- IP verification method
- JavaScript rendering details
Official Documentation
View Official Watchbot Documentation →
Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.