About FirstCoastAuditBot

If you found this page in your server logs, this is what visited you.

FirstCoastAuditBot is the crawler behind the FirstCoast.ai Business Gap Check, a free assessment a business owner can run on their own website. You may also see FirstCoastLaunchAudit, which is the same crawler under a different assessment. Someone requested a report on your domain. If that was not you, see below.

What it does

Requests your homepage, your robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, and a small number of linked pages. Typically under 25 requests in total, one at a time with a delay between them, once. It is not a recurring crawl and it does not return on a schedule.

What it does not do

It does not attempt to log in. It does not access anything that is not publicly served. It does not scan for vulnerabilities, probe ports, submit forms, or follow links that change state. It reads what you publish, the way a search engine does.

robots.txt

We obey it, unless the person who requested the report proved the domain is theirs by verifying an email address on that domain. If your rules tell us to stay out, the scan stops and the report says the site could not be read, which is itself what we report back to them.

Why one of them looks like somebody else's crawler

If you saw a user agent that began with a name like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot and then carried ours after it, that was us, and it was deliberate. Nobody is impersonating OpenAI on your server.

Part of what we measure is whether a site answers AI crawlers differently from ordinary visitors. Sites do this far more often than their owners realise, usually by accident: an edge rule written years ago, a geo-redirect, a consent wall. The effect is that the site looks healthy in a browser and is invisible in AI answers. The only way to measure it is to arrive as one of those crawlers and compare, so we send the token being tested in front of our own name, never instead of it:

OAI-SearchBot FirstCoastAuditBot/1.0 (+https://check.firstcoast.ai/bot; UA-divergence probe)

Our name, our contact address and the link to this page stay inside every one of them, so the request is always attributable to us. The tokens we test with are OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, bingbot, Googlebot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User. That is one request per token against your home page, once, in the same run as everything above.

To block it

User-agent: FirstCoastAuditBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: FirstCoastLaunchAudit
Disallow: /

That takes effect on our next request, and it covers the probes above as well: every one of them carries FirstCoastAuditBot in its user agent, so a rule matching that name stops all of them. To block it permanently and immediately, or to have an existing report about your domain deleted, email the address below with the domain and we will do both. You do not have to explain why.

Contact

mark@firstcoast.ai — a person reads it.

FirstCoast.ai, Northeast Florida. The assessment this crawler feeds is described at check.firstcoast.ai, under the terms of use.