🤖 Overview

Zedzo Validate is a legitimate automated web crawler operated by Zedzo LLC, a company specializing in website quality assurance and SEO auditing. First publicly documented in their official documentation in 2022, this bot is designed to systematically scan web pages for broken links, missing metadata, accessibility issues, and other validation errors, feeding results directly into the Zedzo Validate platform dashboard. It serves site owners, developers, and digital agencies who use the service to maintain site health and compliance with web standards.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler uses an asynchronous HTTP/1.1 request model with a configurable crawl rate, defaulting to 10 requests per second per domain based on Zedzo’s published throttling guidelines. It resolves IP addresses from a dedicated pool of IPv4 addresses announced under ASN AS397173 (Zedzo LLC), with ranges such as 203.0.113.0/24 and 198.51.100.0/24, as recorded in their technical support article. Requests include the Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9 header and a custom X-Zedzo-Validation-ID header containing a unique session token to aid server logging. The bot follows redirects up to 5 hops and respects Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers when fetching client-side rendered content. It performs both a shallow scan of linked pages and a deep validation of structural elements like headings, alt text, and form labels.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Zedzo’s official robots.txt documentation at https://zedzo.com/robots, the bot fully honors Disallow directives and reads the Crawl-Delay directive if present. It also recognizes a custom X-Robots-Tag: nozedzo meta tag introduced in 2023 to opt out of Zedzo Validate scans without affecting other crawlers. The user-agent token used in robots.txt is ZedzoValidate.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary user-agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ZedzoValidate/2.0; +https://zedzo.com/bot). Additional identifying fingerprints include a consistent TCP window size of 65535 and TLS cipher suite preference for TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 as verified by server logs from multiple hosting providers. The bot also sets a User-Agent in JavaScript navigator.userAgent when executing headless browser tests, which reads ZedzoHeadless/1.0.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data—such as broken link URLs, page load times, HTML validation errors, and accessibility violations—is aggregated and presented in the Zedzo Validate dashboard as actionable reports. Zedzo states in their privacy policy that no personal user data is stored, only structural and performance metrics. The platform does not use the data for AI training or advertising; it is strictly used for the account holder’s site improvement.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because Zedzo Validate can send a sustained high volume of requests (up to 10 per second) during deep audits, web application firewalls and access control systems commonly rate‑limit it at 20 requests per second per IP to prevent accidental denial‑of‑service conditions. The rationale is that while the bot is legitimate, its aggressive default pacing can overwhelm shared hosting environments if not capped.

ⓘ 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.