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What is webpagetest?

Direct Answer: WebPageTest is a web performance testing tool operated by Catchpoint, used for measuring webpage performance from various locations and browsers.

Operator: WebPageTest Type: Monitoring Bot Purpose: Web performance testing and monitoring

WebPageTest is a popular, free tool for measuring webpage performance. It enables users to run web performance tests on their site from multiple locations across the world in various browsers. The tool was created by Patrick Meenan in 2008 and was acquired by Catchpoint in 2020. WebPageTest's code remains freely accessible under the Polyform Shield license.

User-Agent Identification

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

  • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0 monitor/webpagetest PTST/190827.180809
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.132 Safari/537.36 monitor/webpagetest PTST/190827.180809

robots.txt Rules for webpagetest

Respects robots.txt: No

This bot does not commit to following robots.txt

webpagetest 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

Crawl Activity Index

Relative crawl activity for webpagetest 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 0.0
Mar 29, 2026 2.1
Mar 30, 2026 0.0
Mar 31, 2026 0.0
Apr 1, 2026 3.1
Apr 2, 2026 3.1
Apr 3, 2026 0.0

Source: Cloudflare Radar

Why track webpagetest traffic?

Distinguish monitoring traffic from real crawler activity. webpagetest 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 webpagetest checks and how frequently, so your monitoring setup matches your infrastructure requirements.

Log Verification

To verify webpagetest 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 WebPageTest)
  3. Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
  4. 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 webpagetest:

  • crawl frequency
  • IP verification
  • JavaScript rendering
  • request pattern

Official Documentation

View Official webpagetest Documentation →

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