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Watchbot

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

Website availability & SSL certificate expiration monitoring Operated by Alex Ryabov.

GoodBot
Assessment
Monitoring & Analytics
Category
BOT
Kind
1
Data sources
AI-generated summary, drawn from Cloudflare, operator docs, and community data

What is Watchbot?

Watchbot is a specialized monitoring tool designed to help website owners maintain service availability and security compliance. Operated by Alex Ryabov, the service integrates directly with Telegram to provide real-time notifications when a monitored URL goes offline or when critical assets like SSL certificates or domain registrations approach their expiration dates. It has been active since 2015 and includes advanced features such as monitoring Certificate Transparency logs to detect unauthorized or new certificates issued for a domain.

Helpful — It provides legitimate uptime and security monitoring services for website administrators.

Identification

Bot name
Watchbot
Operator
Alex Ryabov
Category
Monitoring & Analytics
Kind
BOT
Verification
Verified bot
Cloudflare slug
watchbot
User-agent patterns
Watchbot
User-agent string
Watchbot monitoring robot (https://watchbot.fflow.net)
Main use cases
Website uptime monitoringSSL certificate expiration trackingDomain expiration alerts
Rated Sep 23, 2026 from public evidence

How we rated this bot

Verified by Cloudflare, which confirms who runs it, with no widespread reports of abuse.

Names itself honestly
Yes
Verified by Cloudflare
Yes
Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs
Not stated
Ignores site rules
None found
Disguises itself or evades blocks
None found
Overloads sites
None found
How widely people complain
No complaint about this bot in the evidence
Reddit discussion
Discussion is mixed, with some site owners unhappy about it

What we read

Why it crawls your site

Watchbot crawls specific user-defined URLs to perform health checks and verify the status of security headers and certificates. It does not index content for search or training purposes; instead, it performs lightweight HTTP requests to determine if a site is responsive and to inspect the metadata of its security certificates. Site administrators can verify the bot's activity by checking the logs for the user-agent string provided in its documentation or by visiting the official project page at https://watchbot.fflow.net.

Block or allow Watchbot

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for Watchbot in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block Watchbot from crawling your entire site
User-agent: Watchbot
Disallow: /

# Allow Watchbot full access
User-agent: Watchbot
Allow: /
Allow & verify

Ensure your robots.txt allows Watchbot. Verify requests by checking the user-agent string.

Traffic & trends

Cloudflare Radar traffic

No Cloudflare traffic data available.

Google Trends interest

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Data sources

This profile is compiled from the following sources.

CloudflareRadar
Last updated October 25, 2026

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