Patch visited your site. Here's what he did.
ShipPatrolBot is the crawler behind ShipPatrol scans. It only visits a site when someone asks for a scan at shippatrol.com, or when a site's owner has it on a Patrol plan. It is not a search engine and it doesn't build an index of the web.
How to recognise it
ShipPatrolBot runs a real Chrome browser so it sees your site the way visitors do. Its user agent is Chrome's, with this added at the end:
ShipPatrolBot/1.0 (+https://shippatrol.com/bot/)Each scan visits from three places, because which rules apply depends on where your visitors are: the UK (Azure UK South), the EU (Azure West Europe) and the US (Azure East US).
What it does
- Loads your homepage and follows links on the same site, up to a limited number of pages per scan.
- Records the requests your pages make, the cookies they set and the response headers they send.
- Clicks Accept or Reject on your cookie banner, if you have one, in a fresh browser each time, to see what changes.
- Reads your privacy policy and terms, and fetches robots.txt, sitemap.xml and a page that shouldn't exist, to check your 404 page.
- Reads the JavaScript your pages load, to look for secret keys.
What it never does
- It never submits forms, signs up, logs in, buys anything or posts anything.
- It never guesses passwords or tries to get past a login.
- It doesn't load-test or flood your site.
Deeper checks, only with the owner's permission
Some checks go further than a normal visitor: asking a Supabase or Firebase database for a row using the public key the site itself ships, and checking whether files like /.env or /.git are reachable. Those only run after the site's owner has verified ownership. Patch never stores data read from a database.
How to opt out
Add this to your robots.txt and ShipPatrolBot will stop crawling your site:
User-agent: ShipPatrolBot
Disallow: /If you'd rather we never scan your domain at all, or something looks wrong, email matt@pixelarcventures.co.uk with the domain and roughly when you saw the visit, and we'll look into it.
Who runs it
ShipPatrol is a product of PixelArc Ventures Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 16305788). See the legal notice for our full details and the privacy notice for what we keep from a scan.