NewsGrade Bot

User-Agent: NewsGrade/1.0 (News Website Analyzer; +https://newsgrade.org/bot-info)

What is NewsGrade Analyzer?

NewsGrade Analyzer is an automated tool that evaluates news and information websites against journalism best practices — covering design, trust signals, SEO, mobile experience, structured data, and more.

Accesses only publicly visible pages (homepage, articles, About, Contact)
Respects robots.txt directives
Identifies itself with a consistent, recognizable User-Agent
Does not log in, bypass paywalls, or access private content
Does not submit forms, create accounts, or write data
Does not crawl the full site — only analyzes the specific pages listed above

Controlling access via robots.txt

To explicitly allow or block NewsGrade, add the following to your robots.txt:

✓ Allow NewsGrade
User-agent: NewsGrade
Allow: /
✗ Block NewsGrade
User-agent: NewsGrade
Disallow: /

Is NewsGrade being blocked by your WAF?

If your site uses Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS WAF, or a similar security layer that blocks automated requests, you can verify your site ownership on NewsGrade. Once verified, we'll provide step-by-step instructions to allowlist our specific User-Agent — giving you full control over which tools can access your site.

Questions?

If you have questions about NewsGrade's crawler behavior or need to report an issue, contact us and we'll get back to you.

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