About the FairSiteHQ scanner
If you found FairSiteHQ-Scanner in your site's logs, a FairSiteHQ user ran an automated accessibility check on your pages. This page explains what it does and how to ask us to stop.
What it is
FairSiteHQ is a web accessibility monitoring tool. Its scanner opens pages in a headless Chrome browser and runs automated accessibility checks (the open-source axe-core engine plus a few of our own), then reports the issues to the user who asked for the scan.
The scanner runs fixed rule checks in a browser and sends nothing to an AI service.
Every request it makes carries this in its user agent:
FairSiteHQ-Scanner/1.0 (+https://fairsitehq.com/scanner)
When a user proves they own a site, we also fetch that site's homepage, a verification file or aDNS record, with the user agent FairSiteHQ-Verification/1.0.
What it does on your site
- It loads one page at a time and waits for each to finish loading.
- It follows links on the same hostname, up to the user's page limit (never more than 250 pages per scan). The free homepage scan loads one page.
- It skips PDFs, images and other files.
- On each page it presses the Tab key to check that the page works without a mouse. For this check it doesn't press Enter, click or type anything.
- It doesn't submit forms or make purchases. The one exception: if the site's owner set up logged-in scanning, it fills in and submits that site's login form.
- It doesn't look for security weaknesses or put load on your site beyond loading pages like a visitor would.
Why your site was scanned
Before scanning, every FairSiteHQ user confirms they own the site or have the owner's permission. One-off scans of public pages don't need proof of ownership. Scheduled monitoring, alerts and logged-in scanning do: the site has to carry a verification code that only its owner can add.
Results go only to the account that ran the scan. We don't publish them.
How to stop it
Email privacy@fairsitehq.com from an address at your site's domain and tell us which site. We'll stop scans of it by any account that hasn't verified ownership, including the free homepage scan. If you use FairSiteHQ for your own site, verify it in your dashboard and your own scans keep working.
The scanner doesn't currently read robots.txt, so please email us rather than relying on it.