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:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; InclusifyBot/1.0; +https://inclusifyapp.com/docs/bot) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)

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

  1. Go to Security WAF Custom Rules
  2. Create a new rule with action "Skip" or "Allow"
  3. Set the condition: http.user_agent contains "InclusifyBot"

robots.txt

Add the following to your robots.txt to explicitly allow InclusifyBot:

User-agent: 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. On Pro and Enterprise you can also start an on-demand full-site crawl, which follows links to discover pages, up to your plan’s page allowance
  • • 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)

Need Help?

If you're having trouble with scans or need assistance whitelisting InclusifyBot, contact us at support@inclusifyapp.com