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 12 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

How Do I Get These Insights for My Website?
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

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?

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.

How Do I Block All Developer Helpers?
Serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new developer helpers automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt
User Agent String W3C-checklink/4.2 [4.20] libwww-perl/5.803 
# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: W3C-checklink # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/w3c-checklink
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References