Bot user agents
User agent strings DownCTL uses for monitored-site checks and how to whitelist them.
Bot user agents
Some hosting platforms, WAFs, firewalls, and bot protection tools block automated checks by user agent. DownCTL lets you choose how requests identify themselves when they are sent directly to a site you monitor.
Default user agent
New and existing workspaces default to the generic DownCTL bot user agent:
DownCTLBot/1.0
This is the simplest string to whitelist when you want all monitored-site checks to use one identity.
Function-specific user agents
You can also choose function-specific DownCTL user agents when you want server logs to show which monitor type made a request:
| Function | User agent |
|---|---|
| Uptime checks | DownCTL-Uptime-Bot/1.0 |
| API monitors | DownCTL-API-Monitor/1.0 |
| Site crawl page fetches | DownCTL-Crawler/1.0 |
| Site crawl availability fallback | DownCTL-Crawler/1.0 |
| Sitemap monitors | DownCTL-SitemapMonitor/1.0 |
| Branding suggestions | DownCTL-Branding-Bot/1.0 |
| Lighthouse audits | DownCTL-Lighthouse-Bot/1.0 |
Browser-like compatibility mode
For customer-owned sites behind stricter bot protection, you can choose browser-like compatibility mode:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
This can help when your hosting vendor expects monitoring traffic to look like ordinary browser traffic. It does not bypass JavaScript challenges, login pages, cookies, or other protections that require a real user session.
What the setting affects
Bot user agent settings apply only to requests DownCTL sends directly to monitored sites:
- Uptime checks
- API monitors for the monitored site
- Site crawl page fetches
- Same-site crawl availability checks
- Sitemap fetches and same-site sitemap URL checks
- Status page branding suggestions
- Lighthouse audits
Site settings can inherit workspace defaults or override any individual function.
What the setting does not affect
These requests keep their own DownCTL-controlled user agents or provider defaults:
- Third-party vendor status checks
- Alert delivery webhooks and notification integrations
- Domain registration and RDAP lookups
- Unrelated third-party URLs discovered during crawls
Whitelist request template
Send this to your hosting or WAF vendor:
Please allow DownCTL monitoring traffic for our site. The default user agent is DownCTLBot/1.0. We may also use the function-specific DownCTL user agents or browser-like compatibility mode listed at https://downctl.com/docs/bot-user-agents.