Hexometer

[tangor]

And that is the full UA ...

Robots.txt: no
googlecloud ...
Takes root, css, and some images ...

<tin foil hat, but it ain't>
I have had a large number of "signups" for SemRush, LinkTiger, Hexometer, Atomseo and others THAT I NEVER DID and that makes me wonder why I have become such a popular guy for lihk checkers, speed checkers, validators etc. Wonder where all that "signup stuff" came from? Exploring where the source might be for bandwidth bandits like this I removed the link from my WW profile ... will see if that has an effect. NOT SAYING WW is involved, only that my info here where a batch of SEOs haunt the site might have made me a target.
</tin foil hat, but it ain't>

At any rate, I am now in a DAILY battle with these undesired and never engaged entities banging my site with NO TRAFFIC BENEFIT or visitors.

Odd thing is these folks are so proud of their "products" they send emails saying they are "getting started with your request" and/or complaining when they can't access the site (my deny, of course). The chuckle is this little 775 page hobby site has actually become a honey pot for this new form of SEO robotic abuse in the name of a "helper product". More fun is that it has become a magnet so that I can roll out confirmed deny updates to .htacess to the OTHER commercial properties I manage, many with tens of thousands pages. That saves a boatload of time and bandwidth filtering out noise in search of humans who might actually click a revenue generator.

Hexometer ... even their website is light on what they actually DO ...

</rant off>

YMMV

[iamlost]

Actually I found their website quite amusing...

Hexometer is your AI sidekick

Thy name is Hype-o-meter.

Any service that refuses to say who they are (detailing services provided is ‘what’ not ‘who’) yet expect access to another’s backend (double entendre intended and appropriate) is ‘here be hazard’ writ loud.

Parent company, a Delaware Corp with a Mail Express Store address and a call to action video of a person speaking with a computer generated voice...

Never, never ever feed it after midnight…

[lucy24]

I’m always intrigued by hearing about robots that I’ve never personally set eyes on. It suggests that even if their purpose is inscrutable and inexplicable, something triggers their visits.

:: detour to check logs ::

Oh, will you look at that. In general, blocked requests are out of sight, out of mind, but to my great disgust these weren’t even blocked. A single request in late December, beginning with http
/?ref=hexometer
duly redirected to / at https with all supporting files. (The December element is infuriating because it means I had to dig through archived logs, which takes three times as long to search.) Requests included piwik.js, but they didn’t act on it.

Memo to self: Figure out if there’s any legitimate reason for me to strip query strings rather than block them outright. Does any legitimate entity come in with a query? Maybe some humans from social media? (I do block ?author=1 because those are known to be bogus.)

Edit after checking: Yup, there’s ?fbclid (was there a thread about this?), but others can safely be blocked.

[tangor]

I think ?fbclid is about all I allow these days...