InclusifyBot
Our accessibility scanning bot powered by axe-core, the industry-standard WCAG auditing engine.
What is InclusifyBot?
InclusifyBot is Inclusify's automated accessibility scanner. It visits your website's configured pages to analyze them for accessibility issues, including WCAG violations like missing alt text, poor color contrast, and keyboard navigation problems.
The bot runs daily scans from the Starter plan up, providing you with up-to-date accessibility reports in your dashboard. The Free plan is the widget only and is never visited by the bot.
Powered by axe-core
Under the hood, InclusifyBot uses axe-core, the world's leading accessibility testing engine developed by Deque Systems.
Why axe-core?
- • Used by Microsoft, Google, and thousands of other engineering teams
- • Over a billion npm downloads a year
- • Built to avoid false positives: what it cannot decide is returned as "incomplete" rather than as a failure, so it is not counted against you
- • Comprehensive WCAG 2.0/2.1/2.2 rule coverage
Best Practices: Which Pages to Scan
To get the most value from InclusifyBot, configure a variety of page types. This helps identify structural issues across your site rather than reporting the same issue repeatedly.
Recommended pages to add:
- Homepage- Your main landing page, often contains hero, navigation, and footer components
- Category/Collection page- Tests product grids, filtering UI, and pagination
- Product page- Tests image galleries, add-to-cart forms, and variant selectors
- Cart page- Tests tables, quantity inputs, and form controls
- Blog/Article page- Tests heading hierarchy, long-form content, and embedded media
- Contact/Form page- Tests form fields, labels, error handling, and submit buttons
Pro tip: By scanning different page templates, developers can identify and fix issues at the component/theme level - fixing the root cause instead of individual pages.
User Agent
Every page InclusifyBot loads - a monitoring scan, a crawl, or one of the live checks - is requested with this exact user agent string:
Match on the substring InclusifyBot rather than on the whole string, so a future version number does not break your rule.
Verified bot & Web Bot Auth
InclusifyBot signs the pages it requests with Web Bot Auth (RFC 9421 HTTP Message Signatures, Ed25519). Our public keys are published at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory on inclusifyapp.com, so Cloudflare and other verifiers can confirm a request genuinely comes from us.
The full-site crawl reads your robots.txt before it starts, skips anything disallowed for InclusifyBot, and waits out your Crawl-delay when it asks for a longer gap than our own. Pages you add to monitoring yourself are visited because you nominated them, so that list is what it scans.
Whitelisting InclusifyBot
If your website uses bot protection services like Cloudflare, Sucuri, or similar, you may need to whitelist InclusifyBot to ensure successful scans.
Cloudflare
- Go to Security WAF Custom Rules
- Create a new rule with the condition
http.user_agent contains "InclusifyBot" - Give it the action Skip, and tick every component the scan has to get past: WAF managed rules, rate limiting, and Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode
- Order it above any blanket country or ASN block you run, because the first matching rule decides
The bot protection tick is the one people miss. Our scans leave from a data centre and say so in their user agent, so Cloudflare scores them as automated traffic. A rule that skips managed rules alone still leaves the bot rule free to block them, and the scan keeps failing with HTTP 403 after the rule is live.
robots.txt
Add the following to your robots.txt to explicitly allow InclusifyBot:
Allow: /
Other WAF/Bot Protection
For other services, create a rule that allows requests where the User-Agent header contains InclusifyBot.
Scan Behavior
- • Frequency: Daily scans on Starter, Pro and Enterprise. The Free plan is not scanned
- • Timing: Continuous rather than a nightly batch - a page falls due 20 hours after its own last scan, so there is no fixed clock time
- • Pages: Monitoring visits only the pages configured in your dashboard. From Starter up you can also start a full-site crawl, which follows links to discover pages, up to your plan’s page allowance - once a calendar month on Starter, on demand on Pro and Enterprise
- • Rate limit: One page at a time. The crawl waits at least two seconds between pages, longer if your robots.txt Crawl-delay asks for it
- • Impact: Minimal - one page load per URL, with images, video and web fonts left unfetched
Troubleshooting
Scans failing? Common causes include:
- • Bot protection blocking the scanner
- • Password-protected pages
- • Pages behind authentication
- • Geographic restrictions (IP blocking)
Scan blocked with HTTP 403
When a scan reports Access to that page was refused (HTTP 403), your firewall turned the request away at the edge and your site never ran. Nothing reached us, so there is nothing to audit, and the page itself is fine. A block is not a challenge either: there is no puzzle in it for our browser to solve, so re-running the scan returns the same 403 until the rule changes.
Two requests tell you where the block sits:
curl -I https://example.com/
If robots.txt answers 200 and the page answers 403 with a cf-ray header, your CDN is blocking page requests while your server is healthy. Cloudflare’s block page titles itself “Attention Required! | Cloudflare” and reads “Sorry, you have been blocked”. Repeat the second request with an ordinary browser user agent: a 403 there too means the rule is matching on more than the user agent, so allowing InclusifyBot by name will not be enough on its own.
The fix is the Skip rule in Whitelisting InclusifyBot above, with bot protection included in what it skips. If your policy is to allow by address rather than by user agent, email support@inclusifyapp.com and we will send the scanner’s outbound IP addresses. Once the rule is live, run the scan again.
Need Help?
If you're having trouble with scans or need assistance whitelisting InclusifyBot, contact us at support@inclusifyapp.com