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ReleaseDockBot

Last updated: November 4, 2026

What it is

ReleaseDockBot is the website scanner inside ReleaseDock. A ReleaseDock customer can ask it to read a public website, usually their own, so we can draft a short description of their product, audience, and writing voice. On later scans the customer reviews each suggested change before it is saved.

Every request it makes carries this user agent:

ReleaseDockBot/1.0 (+https://www.releasedock.co/bot)

When it visits

Only when a signed-in member of a ReleaseDock project starts a scan of a website address. It does not crawl the web on its own, revisit sites on a schedule, or follow links to other websites. Each person can start at most 5 scans an hour.

What it fetches

  • Your robots.txt, before any other page.
  • The address it was given, normally your homepage.
  • Your sitemaps: any your robots.txt lists, plus /sitemap.xml, following one level of sitemap index.
  • Links found on the homepage, after the pages from your sitemap.

It stays on the host your homepage finally loads from and reads at most 25 pages per scan, the homepage included. It skips files such as PDFs and images, and stops starting new requests about 2 minutes after the scan begins.

What it reads

The HTML your server returns: each page's title, meta description, and visible text. On the homepage it also notes the theme color and the site icon or social image. It does not run JavaScript, submit forms, sign in, or store cookies.

Page content is treated as information about the site, never as instructions, and the draft it produces is shown to the customer as plain text.

Limits on every request

  • Only http and https addresses on the standard ports, 80 and 443.
  • Never private, loopback, or internal network addresses, checked again after every redirect.
  • At most 5 redirects per request.
  • Each response is cut off at 2 MB, and each request gives up after 10 seconds.

How to block it

ReleaseDockBot follows robots.txt rules for the ReleaseDockBot user agent and skips every page you disallow. To keep it off your whole site, add:

User-agent: ReleaseDockBot
Disallow: /

If the homepage is disallowed, the scan stops and the customer is told the site can't be read.