What is LighthouseBot?
LighthouseBot is a content aggregation crawler operated by Lighthouse, a feed reader and content curation service. It fetches web feeds and their associated articles, as well as URLs manually added by users to their accounts. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when LighthouseBot visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Lighthouse |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| Insights Last Updated | September 17, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
LighthouseBot usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
LighthouseBot's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; LighthouseBot/1.2; +https://lighthouseapp.io/bot-info) Chrome/136.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 |
How To Block LighthouseBot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that LighthouseBot not access your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to request the same of all fetchers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: LighthouseBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/lighthousebot
Disallow: /Insights for LighthouseBot
As of September 17, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by LighthouseBot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block LighthouseBot?
Usually not. Blocking LighthouseBot may leave shared links without a title or image, making them less inviting to click. If it begins fetching at unexpected volume, try rate limiting before blocking it outright. For context, 7% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for LighthouseBot.
Does LighthouseBot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. LighthouseBot is not expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Does LighthouseBot Access Private Content?
No. LighthouseBot has no credentials and should access only the public URL and assets needed for a preview. It does not continue through the rest of your site.
How Can I Tell if LighthouseBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks LighthouseBot visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "LighthouseBot". Look for a page and its preview assets being requested without follow-up navigation. Because LighthouseBot does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
Why Is LighthouseBot Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. LighthouseBot fetched it to build a preview card, and each new share may trigger another request. A spike often means your content is circulating more widely.