W3C-checklink

What is W3C-checklink?

About

W3C-checklink crawls websites to validate links and anchors, checking for broken links, redirects, and link conformance to web standards. You can see how often W3C-checklink visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

Developer helpers generally visit websites on direct behalf of a user who is evaluating some feature or attribute. Visits can be one-off or part of a larger crawl.

Type

Developer Helper
Used by developers to test website functionality

Detail

Operated By World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Last Updated 20 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0%
0% of top websites are blocking W3C-checklink
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
W3C-checklink normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Developer Helpers

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Robots.txt

Should I Block W3C-checklink?

Probably not. Developer helpers are normally used to optimize or find problems with your website.

How Do I Block W3C-checklink?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block W3C-checklink or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent String W3C-checklink/4.3 [4.42] libwww-perl/5.820 
# robots.txt
# This should block W3C-checklink

User-agent: W3C-checklink
Disallow: /

References