Ablestar Link Manager Bot
The Ablestar Link Manager bot is the crawler behind Link Manager, our Shopify app that finds broken links. It scans a Shopify store for pages and links that return errors, so the store owner can fix them before customers find them.
Which sites it visits
The bot only visits Shopify stores whose owner installed Link Manager. A scan starts when the store owner runs one in the app or sets a daily, weekly or monthly schedule.
During a scan the bot loads the store’s pages and follows links on the store’s own domains. It does not crawl other websites, and it does not submit forms, add products to a cart or start a checkout.
How to identify it
Requests from the bot send this User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AblestarLinkManager/1.0; +https://www.ablestar.com/link-manager-bot/)
The bot also signs its requests with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures). Signed requests send this header:
Signature-Agent: "https://linkmanager.ablestar.app"
You can check a signature with the public keys in our key directory.
A store owner can also give Link Manager a Shopify crawler access signature (in the Shopify admin, under Online Store > Preferences > Crawler access). Those requests carry the store owner’s signature from Shopify instead of ours.
robots.txt and crawl rate
The bot follows robots.txt. Rules for the user agent AblestarLinkManager apply, or else the rules for *. If robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay for the bot, the bot waits that long between requests, up to 10 seconds.
The bot makes at most 2 requests to a store at the same time, with a short delay between requests. Each scan stops at the page limit of the store’s Link Manager plan.
What happens to the data
For each page, the bot records the URL, the HTTP status code and the pages that link to it. Only the store owner sees these results in Link Manager. We store them in our own cloud infrastructure and do not sell or share them. See our privacy policy for details.
How to stop it
If you own the store, delete the scan schedule in Link Manager, or uninstall the app.
For any site, you can block the bot in robots.txt:
User-agent: AblestarLinkManager
Disallow: /
Contact
If the bot causes a problem on your site, email support@ablestar.com. Tell us the domain and the time of the requests, and we will look into it.
