PassciteBot
Last updated
PassciteBot/1.0 probably showed up in your logs. This page says what it was doing there and how to make it stop.What it reads
Someone asked Passcite for a report on your website — usually the agency or consultant looking after it, sometimes the owner. To build that report PassciteBot reads the public pages a buyer could open without signing in: the homepage, robots.txt, the sitemap if there is one, and up to about two dozen pages the sitemap and navigation point at — services, pricing, locations, FAQs, reviews. It reads the text and the schema.org markup. It does not submit forms, follow links off your site, run JavaScript, or download images or files.
It does not write anything to your site. Passcite publishes changes only to sites whose owner has connected them and approved each change, through a separate authenticated integration, never through this crawler.
How often
Once per report. A report on a domain is reused for seven days, so the same site is not read more than once a week by the free report, and a connected site is re-read after a change is published. Pages are fetched a few at a time, with a pause between batches.
How to refuse it
Add this to your robots.txt and PassciteBot stops before reading a second page:
User-agent: PassciteBot
Disallow: /A blanket User-agent: * with Disallow: / is obeyed the same way. A robots.txt refusal is final: the report for your site fails with a note that the site declined to be read.
Why it may retry as a browser
Some firewalls return 403 to any User-Agent containing the word “Bot”, including ours, without the site owner having decided anything about Passcite. When the declared request is refused that way, PassciteBot retries the same URL once with an ordinary browser User-Agent. The report then says so, because the same firewall rule may be refusing the AI assistants' own crawlers, which is worth the owner knowing.
That retry never overrides robots.txt. If your robots.txt names PassciteBot or all agents and disallows them, we stop regardless of what the firewall does.
Contact
Questions, or a request to delete what was read: hello@passcite.com. What a report stores is described on the privacy page.