Readable is a bot in the accessibility checkers category, operated by Added Bytes Ltd.
Readable is a collection of text analysis tools, primarily focused on clarity and plain language. We spider customers' websites, find the content of each page, analyse it, and present that to the customer.
Accessibility checkers scan pages for WCAG issues on behalf of site owners and auditors. Allow the checkers you run and keep them out of analytics.
Readable identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 Readable/1.1.4Anyone 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 Readable 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: Readable Disallow: /
User-agent: Readable Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Readable Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Readable Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Readable group, Readable ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Readable from Readable's user agent; check Added Bytes Ltd'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 Readable if it is a service you use, and keep its visits out of page views and ad requests either way.
Transfon Security for publishersReadable is not a person. Exclude it from campaign and conversion data so reports reflect real visitors.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllow Readable only if it works for your store, and keep it away from cart and checkout.
Transfon Security for e-commerceIf Readable 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 Readable 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
Readable is a bot in the accessibility checkers category, operated by Added Bytes Ltd. Readable is a collection of text analysis tools, primarily focused on clarity and plain language. We spider customers' websites, find the content of each page, analyse it, and present that to the customer.
We have not confirmed whether Readable 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: Readable" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Readable/" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Readable may not follow it, and anyone can send Readable's user agent, so a fake Readable ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Accessibility checkers scan pages for WCAG issues on behalf of site owners and auditors. Allow the checkers you run and keep them out of analytics.
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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