Why can LinkCheck totals differ from Siteimprove reports?

Crawler Management counts URLs seen during fetching. Siteimprove later applies exclusions, aliases, and deduplication, so a product report can contain fewer stored pages or links.

Can robots.txt reliably block LinkCheck?

The available record does not confirm compliance. It also records a human-readable user-agent phrase rather than a documented robots product token, so test a `LinkCheck` rule against actual requests and use an edge control when certainty matters.

Are LinkCheck and Siteimprove Crawl the same log identity?

No. this bot uses `LinkCheck by Siteimprove`, while Siteimprove Crawl uses `SiteCheck-sitecrawl`. A filter or access rule for one string will not necessarily match the other.

Does allowing LinkCheck help an AI system cite my site?

There is no documented connection. LinkCheck feeds Siteimprove's auditing products and is not identified as a crawler for AI answers, grounding, or model training.

LinkCheck & AI Search: What to Know

What is LinkCheck?

LinkCheck is a Siteimprove crawler used to inspect site content and links. The resulting data supports Siteimprove's quality assurance, SEO, and accessibility work, including checks against an organization's content policies and brand rules.

The crawler can be part of a scheduled site scan or a manual recheck of a page, group, or whole site. Siteimprove first parses the URLs it finds and then processes the crawl data. Configured exclusions, aliases, and deduplication can change which pages and links appear in the finished reports.

LinkCheck may revisit many pages when a Siteimprove customer scans a large property. Siteimprove provides account-level controls for timing and scope, and its crawler FAQ says the service can add longer pauses when a server appears strained. A log entry therefore reflects a site audit, not a person browsing the page.

Nothing in the source material identifies LinkCheck as an AI training or answer-retrieval crawler. Its reports can expose broken or inaccessible content that a site owner may choose to repair, but the crawl itself does not provide documented visibility in AI search.

Indirectly relevant

Is LinkCheck relevant for AI search?

Indirectly. LinkCheck has no AI product of its own, but its output can end up in the systems that AI answers draw on.

LinkCheck is an SEO auditing crawler. It has no direct effect on search rankings or AI answers, but the reports it feeds are used to fix crawlability and content issues that do affect how search and AI systems see your site.

How to handle LinkCheck

If LinkCheck belongs to your Siteimprove setup, adjust scan scope and frequency in Crawler Management before denying it. Sites with no Siteimprove account should ask whether a vendor or agency initiated the scan, especially if requests arrive on a predictable schedule.

The recorded HTTP user agent contains LinkCheck by Siteimprove. A syntactically valid robots product token can target its leading identifier:

User-agent: LinkCheck
Disallow: /

The record leaves robots.txt compliance unknown, and Siteimprove does not document here which robots token this client selects. Check whether requests stop. Enforce a block at the server or edge if the robots rule is ignored.

Examples

A content team asks Siteimprove to recheck a migrated section. LinkCheck follows the section's internal links, while excluded legacy URLs disappear during later report processing.
An agency scan sends more requests than a small server can comfortably answer. The client changes the scan window and delay in Siteimprove instead of losing its link reports entirely.

Frequently asked questions about LinkCheck

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

No. Link checking is part of its job, but Siteimprove also uses the crawl for quality assurance, accessibility, SEO, policy, and brand-related checks.