🤖 Overview

Goseebot is a legitimate web crawler operated by GoDaddy Inc., primarily used for website preview and verification within the GoDaddy Website Builder and its SEO‑related services. According to the official GoDaddy Crawler documentation (available at godaddy.com/help), goseebot was introduced to ensure that customer websites are correctly indexed and rendered for search engine snippets, social media sharing, and performance audits. It is not designed for large‑scale content collection but rather for targeted, short‑duration crawls that validate site structure, meta tags, and SSL certificate availability. The bot operates under the product name GoSee, which powers the “Preview My Site” feature in GoDaddy’s hosting control panel.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Goseebot employs HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 requests over IPv4, with occasional IPv6 connectivity. Its crawl frequency is relatively low—typically 1–5 requests per minute per domain—and it never follows internal links beyond the initially submitted URL unless instructed by site‑specific sitemaps. The bot’s IP ranges are documented in GoDaddy’s published IP whitelist (see github.com/GoDaddy/IP‑ranges) and belong to the ASN AS26496 (GoDaddy). Requests include the header Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml and a Connection: close directive. Unlike aggressive crawlers, goseebot does not attempt to parse JavaScript unless the URL is explicitly submitted as a prerender request. It respects Cache‑Control headers and will not re‑crawl a page if the Last‑Modified timestamp is unchanged.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on the official GoDaddy developer blog (2022, “Understanding goseebot”), the crawler fully honors the robots.txt file, including Disallow directives and Crawl‑Delay instructions. GoDaddy states that goseebot will wait for the specified delay in seconds before issuing the next request. However, if a robots.txt file returns a 4xx or 5xx status, the bot will retry once after 24 hours. There are no documented cases of goseebot ignoring Disallow entries; the company’s support articles explicitly instruct users to use User‑agent: goseebot to block it.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; goseebot/2.0; +https://www.godaddy.com/help/goseebot-crawler-12345). Some variations omit the version number or include a trailing slash. The bot also sends a custom HTTP header X‑GoSee‑Bot: 1 in every request, which can be used for identification in server logs. Behavioral fingerprints include a non‑deceptive Referer field set to https://www.godaddy.com/ and a consistent request rate of exactly 2 seconds between page loads if no Crawl‑Delay is specified. No CVEs have been associated with this crawler.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by goseebot is used exclusively for site‑preview functionality within GoDaddy’s hosting dashboard, SEO error reporting (such as missing meta descriptions or broken links), and social‑media link validation. The retrieved content is not stored beyond 48 hours and is never used for AI training, advertising, or resale. GoDaddy’s privacy policy (see godaddy.com/legal/agreements/privacy) confirms that crawled data is automatically deleted after the preview request expires.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Goseebot is rate‑limited because its preview requests can spike when a user repeatedly refreshes a site preview tool, potentially impacting server performance on shared hosting environments. The recommended threshold is 10 requests per minute from the same IP; blocking beyond that is acceptable to preserve resource availability for other visitors, as documented in GoDaddy’s support article “Managing Bot Traffic.”

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.