PressmeritBot
PressmeritBot is the verification crawler behind Pressmerit. Its only job is to open a page that was reported as a published placement and check that the agreed link is on it: the target, the anchor text and the rel attribute the two sides settled on.
If it turned up in your logs, one of two things happened: a publisher marked a placement on your site as live, or a Pressmerit user reported a link they were told had been published there. Nothing else on your site is fetched.
user agent
PressmeritBot/1.0 (+https://pressmerit.com/bot)What it does, exactly
Scope, schedule and limits
Everything below is what the crawler does today. If you need it to behave differently on your site, the last line is a working address.
- It fetches only URLs that were submitted to it
- Every request maps to one page that a publisher or a Pressmerit user submitted for placement verification. There is no seed list, no discovery queue, and no sweep of your domain.
- It never crawls beyond the submitted page
- No link following, no directory guessing, no sitemap walk. It requests the URL it was given, reads the HTML that comes back, and stops. It does not log in, submit forms, or reach anything behind authentication.
- The schedule is per link, not per site
- A check when the placement is first reported, weekly checks through the first month, then a re-check every 30 days for as long as the initiating subscription is active. Ten links on your site mean ten independent schedules, not ten times the load on any one page.
- It backs off when you tell it to
- A 429 ends the run there and then, and the check is rescheduled with exponential backoff rather than retried in place. One fetch per check either way. Never a burst.
- A person reads bot@pressmerit.com
- Tell us to stop fetching a page, ask what a particular request was for, or flag anything that looks wrong. Blocking the user agent above works too, and costs a publisher nothing on our side.
Questions about a request
Write to the crawler’s owners
Include the URL and the timestamp from your log and we can tell you which check it was, which placement it belonged to, and when the next one is due.