Chrome-Lighthouse is a bot in the SEO crawlers category, operated by Google.
Chrome-Lighthouse is an automated, open-source tool for auditing web page quality and does not operate as a traditional web crawler. It runs a series of audits against a given page to generate a report on performance and accessibility.
SEO crawlers map links, keywords and technical issues for SEO tools and backlink databases. They help the tool's customers, often your competitors, rather than you. Rate limit or block the ones you do not use.
Chrome-Lighthouse identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3464.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 Chrome-LighthouseAnyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
We have not confirmed whether Chrome-Lighthouse follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Chrome-Lighthouse Disallow: /
User-agent: Chrome-Lighthouse Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Chrome-Lighthouse Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Chrome-Lighthouse Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Chrome-Lighthouse group, Chrome-Lighthouse ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Chrome-Lighthouse from Chrome-Lighthouse's user agent; check Google's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Chrome-Lighthouse works for an SEO tool's customers, often your competitors. It adds server load without readers, so rate limit or block it unless you use the tool.
Transfon Security for publishersSEO crawlers map landing pages and links for competitor research. Keep Chrome-Lighthouse's visits out of campaign data.
Transfon Security for advertisersChrome-Lighthouse can map your catalogue, prices and site structure for competitors. Block it unless you use the tool yourself.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Chrome-Lighthouse only if your team uses the tool; otherwise rate limit it on docs and marketing pages.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Chrome-Lighthouse by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
Chrome-Lighthouse is a bot in the SEO crawlers category, operated by Google. Chrome-Lighthouse is an automated, open-source tool for auditing web page quality and does not operate as a traditional web crawler. It runs a series of audits against a given page to generate a report on performance and accessibility.
We have not confirmed whether Chrome-Lighthouse follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: Chrome-Lighthouse" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Chrome-Lighthouse" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Chrome-Lighthouse may not follow it, and anyone can send Chrome-Lighthouse's user agent, so a fake Chrome-Lighthouse ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
SEO crawlers map links, keywords and technical issues for SEO tools and backlink databases. They help the tool's customers, often your competitors, rather than you. Rate limit or block the ones you do not use.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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