For website owners
About the KookaWatch bot
If you've seen KookaWatch in your website's logs, this page explains what it is, why it visited, and how to control it.
What it is
KookaWatch is an Australian website health monitoring service. Its bot checks websites for their owners: whether the site is up, whether its SSL certificate and domain are about to expire, and, once a week, whether its pages have broken links or problems that hide them from search engines.
It identifies itself in every request with a User-Agent like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; KookaWatch/1.0; +https://kookawatch.com/bot; monitor)
The last part says which part of KookaWatch it is: monitor (uptime, SSL and domain checks), healthreport (a full-site check) or crawler.
Why it visited your site
KookaWatch only checks a website when someone has shown it's theirs: by adding a DNS record, a meta tag or a file to the site, or by asking from an email address at the site's own domain and confirming it. Nobody can point KookaWatch at a site they don't control.
If you don't know who added your site, it may be your web developer, an agency or someone in your business. If you'd like us to stop, email us (below) and we'll look into it.
How much it asks of your site
- Uptime: one request for the home page every 5 minutes, plus a re-check from a second location when it looks down.
- SSL certificate and domain: a certificate check a few times a day and a domain registration lookup once a day.
- Full check: once a week (and when the owner asks for a re-check), up to a few hundred pages at no more than 2 requests a second, one at a time.
robots.txt
The full check obeys robots.txt. It follows the rules for User-agent: KookaWatch if there are any, otherwise those for User-agent: *. To keep it out of part of your site:
User-agent: KookaWatch Disallow: /private/
Uptime checks only request the home page and don't read robots.txt, like any uptime monitor. The bot doesn't read Crawl-delay: it's already gentle, but if you'd like it slower still, email us.
Where it comes from
Requests come from these addresses. Add them to your firewall's or security plugin's allowlist if they're being blocked.
| Address | Location | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| 103.93.68.223 | Melbourne | uptime, SSL and domain checks |
| 3.24.4.84 | Sydney (AWS) | uptime, SSL and domain checks |
| 103.93.68.222 | Melbourne | full-site crawls and site verification |
Contact
Questions, problems or a request to stop: abuse@kookawatch.com or support@kookawatch.com. A person reads every email.