Five49

For site operators

The Five49-Scanner

If you found Five49-Scanner in your server logs, this page is for you: what it is, what it fetches, the rules it keeps, and how to keep it out.

What it is

Five49 tests online shops for accessibility barriers against WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The scanner is our own software. It visits a shop either because the shop asked us for a scan or an order, or as part of our own survey of online shops in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

It fetches your robots.txt, your sitemap and a limited number of publicly reachable HTML pages, and reads their markup. It does not log in, does not fill in or submit forms, does not put anything in a basket and does not run JavaScript.

How it identifies itself

Every request carries this user agent:

Five49-Scanner/1.0 (+https://five49.com/scanner; info@five49.com)

Some servers turn away any client without a browser-style prefix. If a page answers with HTTP 403, 406, 429 or 503, the scanner asks once more, in the standard form that well-known crawlers use — with the same name and the same link:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Five49-Scanner/1.0; +https://five49.com/scanner)

If that is refused too, it stops there.

The rules it keeps

  • robots.txt is binding. It is read before the first page, and what it excludes for Five49-Scanner is not fetched.
  • No way around bot protection. We never work around challenges, CAPTCHAs or access controls. Beyond the one retry described above, a refusal is accepted.
  • Public pages only. Nothing behind a login, nothing that needs an account.

How to exclude it

Add these two lines to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Five49-Scanner
Disallow: /

Questions about a visit, or anything that looks wrong in your logs: info@five49.com. The provider is named in the imprint.