LaunchCheckBot
If you found this URL in your server logs or your WAF dashboard, this page explains exactly what it was and how to stop it.
What it is
LaunchCheckBot is not a crawler. It fetches a page only when a person pastes that URL into getlaunchcheck.com and asks for an audit. It does not discover links and follow them, it does not return on a schedule, and it does not index anything.
- User agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LaunchCheckBot/0.1; +https://getlaunchcheck.com/bot)- Trigger
- A human submitting that exact URL
- Requests
- Around 20 per audit: the page,
robots.txt,llms.txt,sitemap.xml, the favicon, the og:image, a deliberate 404 probe, and up to 8 of the page's own internal links to find broken ones - Rate
- One audit at a time, results cached for a minute, capped at 20 per IP per minute
- JavaScript
- Never executed. It reads the HTML your server sends, which is also what most AI crawlers see
- Stored
- Nothing. No page content is retained after the report is generated
Why you might see a 404 you did not expect
The audit requests one URL that is designed not to exist, something like
/launchcheck-probe-1754049600000. That is how it checks whether your
site returns a real 404 status for missing pages rather than a
200 with a "not found" message, which quietly poisons search indexing.
It is a single request and it is meant to fail.
How to block it
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: LaunchCheckBot
Disallow: /Or block the user agent at your CDN or WAF. Either is fine, and nothing will complain at you.
One thing worth checking first
If your WAF already blocked LaunchCheckBot automatically, it is worth finding out
what else it is blocking. Bot rules are usually written as "known browsers only" or
against a managed bot list, and both of those catch GPTBot,
ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot as well.
Plenty of sites publish a robots.txt that welcomes AI crawlers while
their CDN turns those same crawlers away before robots.txt is ever
read. You can check in two commands:
curl -sI -A "Mozilla/5.0" https://yoursite.com/ | head -1
curl -sI -A "GPTBot" https://yoursite.com/ | head -1
If the first returns 200 and the second does not, you are invisible to
AI assistants — and if that was not deliberate, it is worth fixing whether or not
you ever use this tool.
Contact
Something wrong, or want this bot to stop entirely? Open an issue or email hello@getlaunchcheck.com.