Stop pseolint from auditing your site

pseolint lets anyone audit any public URL. That's the OSS-first product. If your site is being audited and you want it to stop, you have two paths — one you control directly, one we control on request.

Self-serve: robots.txt opt-out

Our crawler honours robots.txt (Disallow paths AND Crawl-delay) and identifies itself with the user-agent token pseolint. Add these two lines to https://yourdomain.example/robots.txt and the next audit attempt will fetch zero pages from your site:

User-agent: pseolint
Disallow: /

The full UA string we send is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; pseolint/0.5.1; +https://pseolint.dev/bot). You can also block at your CDN/WAF by matching that token.

Server-side: blocklist by request

If you can't edit robots.txt (third-party host, no access, etc.) or you want a hard block at our edge, email abuse@pseolint.dev and we'll add the domain to our host blocklist. After that, any audit request for your domain returns a 403 before we touch the network.

We need to verify ownership before adding the block (otherwise this becomes its own harassment vector). One of:

  • DNS TXT record we'll give you in the reply (e.g. pseolint-abuse=<token>)
  • An email reply from an address on the affected domain
  • Public WHOIS contact match

What we already do to limit damage

  • Per-host hourly cap of 30 fresh audits (across all users)
  • Per-user daily cap of 15 audits against any single host (Pro) / 3 (free) / 1 (anon)
  • Per-anon-IP daily cap of 1 audit against any single host
  • 1-hour URL-level dedup — repeat audits return cached results, no re-crawl
  • Honour robots.txt, Crawl-delay, and Retry-After
  • Max 5 parallel fetches per audit, 50 MB per audit, 200 pages per audit
  • SSRF guard rejects private/internal addresses

Full operational details at /limits.

Other concerns

Bug reports, security issues, or anything that doesn't fit above: hello@pseolint.dev. For security issues affecting users of the hosted product, please use a subject line starting with [security] so we can triage faster.