In short
- Our crawler identifies itself as MerchantLionBot.
- It respects robots.txt and crawls politely within strict limits.
- It never places orders, submits payment details or bypasses protections.
- You can block it with one line in robots.txt.
What MerchantLionBot is
MerchantLionBot is the crawler that MerchantLion uses to inspect a store’s public pages when that store’s owner (or their authorised agency) runs a diagnosis. It does not crawl the web at large.
How to recognise it
User agent:
MerchantLionBot/1.0 (+https://merchantlion.com/legal/scanner; independent compliance scanner; not affiliated with Google)
It never pretends to be Googlebot or any other crawler.
How it behaves
- Fetches robots.txt first and obeys rules for
MerchantLionBot(or*). - Limits concurrency to 2 requests at a time with at least 250 ms between requests, and stops at a fixed page and time budget per scan.
- Renders JavaScript for a small number of pages and takes screenshots for the report.
- If the merchant enables the cart test: adds one product to a cart and opens the checkout entry page, then stops. It never enters personal or payment details and never places an order.
- Does not solve CAPTCHAs, bypass bot protection, or log in.
How to block it
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: MerchantLionBot Disallow: /
If you believe our scanner was used on your site without authorisation, email support@merchantlion.com with the date and your domain and we will investigate.
Contact
Questions? Email support@merchantlion.com, message us on WhatsApp (@italiano999) or write to MerchantLion, 5 Rue du Docteur Pierre Rouques, 95100 Argenteuil, France.