MessageKitBot

Last updated 29 September 2026

What it is

MessageKitBot is the crawler MessageKit uses to read a business's own website. It reads a site when that business signs up with MessageKit and gives the site as its address, and it can read again if that business asks us to try again. It is not a search engine crawler and it does not roam the web.

What it reads

Each read fetches at most 10 pages and stylesheets, starting with the homepage, plus the robots.txt file of each host it checks. It only makes GET requests, stays on that one site (following a redirect from the address it was given), and never signs in or fills in a form. It uses what it finds to suggest the business's details, colours, fonts, logo and photos to the person who signed up.

How it identifies itself

Every request carries this user agent:

MessageKitBot/1.0 (+https://messagekit.co/bot)

How to stop it

MessageKitBot follows your robots.txt file, on every host it visits. It obeys a group named MessageKitBot, or the * group if there is none. To keep it out of your whole site, add this to /robots.txt:

User-agent: MessageKitBot
Disallow: /

If your robots.txt disallows the homepage, or your server answers it with an error or a rate limit, MessageKitBot reads nothing else. A site with no robots.txt at all is read.

What happens to what it reads

We keep the raw material for 30 days after a read on a paid plan and 7 days on the Free plan, and delete it in a nightly clean-up. The details we suggested from it, and any photos the person who signed up chose to keep, are stored with their brand until they delete them or the brand. Nothing it reads is used until that person confirms it.

Questions

If MessageKitBot visited your site and you would like to know why, or you want to report a problem, write to legal@sparrowsoft.co.