NorthicBot

The reader Northic uses to look at a business's public website.

If you saw NorthicBot in your site's visitor log or in your security settings, it was us. Here is what it does.

When it visits

• When someone asks for a free report on a business. That's usually the owner, checking how their business shows up online.
• Once a month, for businesses that use Northic, to see whether anything on their site has changed.
• To find a business's public contact address, from its home page and contact page only.

What it reads

• Your home page, plus robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt if you have them.
• For a contact address, at most one more page: the one your home page links to as "Contact".
• If it's turned away, it asks once more under your site's other name (with or without "www"), then stops.

It doesn't follow links around your site, fill in forms, sign in anywhere, click ads or load anything behind a password. It reads what anyone visiting your home page would see.

How it identifies itself

Every request carries this name:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; NorthicBot/1.0; +https://northicgrowth.com/bot)

To let it in

If your site sits behind a security service (Cloudflare, Sucuri, Wordfence or your host's firewall), add a rule that allows visitors whose user agent contains NorthicBot. In Cloudflare, that's a custom rule under Security, set to skip for that user agent. Your web person can do it in two minutes.

To keep it out

• Add this to your robots.txt, and no report will read your site:
  User-agent: NorthicBot
Disallow: /
• Or block the name in your security settings. The report will simply say it couldn't read the site.

Questions

Email hello@northicgrowth.com and a person will answer.