PWABuilder is a bot in the monitoring and analytics bots category, operated by Microsoft.
PWABuilder (pwabuilder.com) is a free, open source developer tool from Microsoft that helps developers build progressive web apps and publish them in app stores. PWABuilder tool analyzes their website for Progressive Web App capabilities, such as a web manifest or service worker
Monitoring bots check uptime, performance and page changes on behalf of a site owner or a third party. Allow the services you run yourself and exclude them from analytics so they do not inflate page views.
PWABuilder identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36 Edg/96.0.1054.57 PWABuilderHttpAgentAnyone 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.
PWABuilder follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent Disallow: /
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent group, PWABuilder ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.PWABuilderHttpAgent from PWABuilder's user agent; check Microsoft'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.
Allow PWABuilder if it is a service you use, and keep its visits out of page views and ad requests either way.
Transfon Security for publishersPWABuilder is not a person. Exclude it from campaign and conversion data so reports reflect real visitors.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllow PWABuilder only if it works for your store, and keep it away from cart and checkout.
Transfon Security for e-commerceIf PWABuilder is a service you use, allow it on the endpoints it needs and block it elsewhere.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows PWABuilder 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
PWABuilder is a bot in the monitoring and analytics bots category, operated by Microsoft. PWABuilder (pwabuilder.com) is a free, open source developer tool from Microsoft that helps developers build progressive web apps and publish them in app stores. PWABuilder tool analyzes their website for Progressive Web App capabilities, such as a web manifest or service worker
Yes. PWABuilder follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the PWABuilderHttpAgent user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: PWABuilderHttpAgent" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "PWABuilderHttpAgent" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so PWABuilder may not follow it, and anyone can send PWABuilder's user agent, so a fake PWABuilder ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Monitoring bots check uptime, performance and page changes on behalf of a site owner or a third party. Allow the services you run yourself and exclude them from analytics so they do not inflate page views.
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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