Which visits come from the MarketingTracer bot
The SEO scan loads your pages in Chrome and reports, page by page, what works and what doesn't. Once someone turns on the uptime monitor, it requests your homepage every 30 minutes, from two servers in turn.
The MarketingTracer bot's user agents and header
Match the SEO scan on this string, which follows Chrome's own user agent:
MarketingTracer/1.0 (crawl; +https://www.marketingtracer.com/bot)For the uptime monitor, match this user agent:
MarketingTracer/1.0 (uptime; +https://www.marketingtracer.com/bot)Anyone can copy a user agent, so the SEO scan and the uptime monitor also send this header, with a secret value for your site:
X-SEO-CrawlerOnly your site gets that value; third-party files never do.
How to get the MarketingTracer bot past your firewall
Your header value is in MarketingTracer, under Settings in the site's menu. The card "Let MarketingTracer through your firewall" also has rules for Cloudflare and AWS WAF, ready to copy. Without a MarketingTracer login, ask the person who added your site.
Cloudflare: create a custom rule that matches the X-SEO-Crawler header with your value. Pick the action Skip and tick the remaining custom rules, rate limiting rules, managed rules and Super Bot Fight Mode. Then move the rule to the top of your custom rules. Cloudflare runs them from top to bottom, so a rule above it, such as a challenge for visitors from other countries, still stops the bot: our servers are in France. Bot Fight Mode on the free plan is the exception: no rule skips it, so turn it off if the bot is still blocked.
AWS WAF: put the card's header rule in your web ACL, action Allow, above Bot Control. AWS stops at the first rule that allows a request.
Last resort: firewalls that can't match a header can use the IP list at https://app.marketingtracer.com/rest/bot/ips.json, in Googlebot's format. Those addresses can change, unlike the header.
FAQ
1. Does MarketingTracer respect robots.txt?
No. MarketingTracer works only for verified site owners and their teams or agencies, so the SEO scan tests a site at their request, including pages robots.txt keeps from search engines. The report shows which pages robots.txt excludes.
2. Why does my uptime monitor say Blocked?
Your firewall is blocking the uptime checks. Let them through with the rule above, and check that it's the first of your custom rules; the uptime page links to your settings. Within 30 minutes, the next check shows whether it works.
3. Can I block the MarketingTracer bot?
Yes, block every user agent that contains MarketingTracer/. The SEO scan and the uptime checks of your site then fail, and the uptime monitor shows Blocked. If you don't know who added your site, contact MarketingTracer.