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OhDearBot

OhDearBot is a monitoring bot operated by Oh Dear that performs uptime checks, broken link detection, and mixed content scanning.
Oh DearOhDearBot
Monitoring

What is OhDearBot?

An Oh Dear request can reach a domain for two different reasons. The domain may have its own Oh Dear monitor, or an Oh Dear customer may link to it and enable checks for outgoing links. In both cases, the request belongs to a website-health task rather than an open-ended indexing crawl.

The broken-link and mixed-content crawler starts at the monitor URL and follows reachable internal links. It reads raw HTML without executing JavaScript. A routine crawl runs every 24 hours and ends after 5,000 pages or 20 minutes, whichever limit it reaches first.

Oh Dear's current crawler user agents start with OhDear.app and include a documentation URL for the check type. The token documented for robots.txt is OhDear. The crawler follows those rules by default, but the customer who owns the monitor can switch that behavior off. Its compliance is therefore configurable, not guaranteed.

OhDearBot checks links, mixed content, sitemaps, and other operational conditions. Oh Dear does not describe this crawler as a source for AI answers or model training. Its requests may affect a customer's monitoring report, but they have no documented effect on AI search visibility.

Not relevant for AI search

Is OhDearBot relevant for AI search?

No. OhDearBot is not part of AI search or training, so allowing or blocking it does not change your AI visibility.

OhDearBot runs synthetic monitoring or uptime checks on a schedule. It is not collecting content for any index or model, so it has no bearing on search rankings or AI answers. You usually see it because your own team or a service you use set up a check.

How to handle OhDearBot

Leave relevant routes reachable when your team uses Oh Dear's site checks. To omit only an admin area or another unwanted section, use a path-specific rule or the monitor's crawl controls instead of blocking every request.

Oh Dear publishes this crawler group:

User-agent: OhDear
Disallow: /

That rule blocks a normal crawl, but a monitor owner can disable the Respect robots.txt setting. Check that setting if traffic continues. Oh Dear also provides per-monitor exclusions and current static monitoring addresses. When a WAF needs an exception, combine source information with the OhDear.app* prefix and limit the rule to the monitored paths. The user agent alone is not authentication.

Examples

  • During its daily crawl, Oh Dear follows an internal link to a removed page and records the 404 in the monitor's broken-link report.
  • A domain with no Oh Dear account receives an `OhDear.app` request because a monitored site links to it and checks external destinations.

Frequently asked questions about OhDearBot

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

A customer can ask Oh Dear to verify outgoing links from a monitored site. Your page may be one of those external destinations.

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