OptSEO-Checker

Last updated: November 1, 2026

OptSEO-Checker is the automated reader behind OptSEO's local presence check. When a business owner gives us links to their own listings on directory sites, it opens those pages and compares the business name, phone number and address shown there with the details the owner gave us. If you run a website and saw it in your logs, this page explains what it does and how to stop it.

How to recognise it

Every request it makes sends this User-Agent header:

OptSEO-Checker/1.0 (+https://optweb.co/checker)

In robots.txt it answers to the product token OptSEO-Checker. The version number may change, so match on the token rather than the whole string.

What it reads

• Only the listing links a business owner gave us for their own business, for example their page on Yelp, BBB, Bing Places, Apple Maps or Facebook. It does not crawl, follow links on the page, or look for other pages.
• Only publicly available pages. It makes plain GET requests. It never logs in, submits forms, posts, or changes anything.
• Only structured data. It reads the business name, phone number and address from JSON-LD, schema.org microdata or hCard markup on the page, never from free text. A page listing several businesses where none is recognisably the owner's is not compared.
• Never Google pages. Google Business Profiles are checked through Google's own Places API instead.

What it finds (match, mismatch, or "check by hand") goes only to that business's owner, with the link, so they can fix their own listing. Nothing is written to your site or the listing.

robots.txt

Before it requests any page, OptSEO-Checker fetches that site's /robots.txt and follows it, per RFC 9309:

• It obeys the group for OptSEO-Checker if there is one, otherwise the * group. The longest matching rule wins; * and $ wildcards are supported.
• If robots.txt disallows the page, it does not request it. The owner is told to check that listing by hand.
• If robots.txt answers with a server error, 429 Too Many Requests, or no answer at all, it treats the whole site as disallowed and does not request the page. A 404 (no robots.txt) means no restrictions.
• It follows redirects itself, at most three, and checks the robots.txt of each new site before requesting anything from it.

To block it from your whole site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: OptSEO-Checker
Disallow: /

How often, and how much

• It runs only for OptSEO customers on a paid plan or free trial, right after we audit that customer's own website: on their monitoring schedule (every 7 or every 30 days) or when they start an audit themselves.
• Each run requests robots.txt once per site, then each listing link the owner gave us once, one request at a time, plus at most three redirects per link. It does not keep copies of pages between runs.
• Each request times out after 10 seconds, and it reads at most the first 2 MB of a page.
• Requests come from OptSEO's servers through a guard that only connects to public internet addresses on the standard web ports (80 and 443).

Contact

If OptSEO-Checker is causing you a problem, or you want us to stop reading your site, email info.optiweb.agency@gmail.com with your domain and, if you can, a sample log line. robots.txt is the quickest way: it is read fresh on every run, so a change applies from the next one. For security issues, see our security contact.