What it is
MerchantGuardBot is the page checker behind Merchant Guard, a tool that helps online shops fix problems with their Google Shopping listings. When a shop owner asks Merchant Guard to fix, for example, a price that doesn’t match their website, MerchantGuardBot opens that shop’s own product pages to read the current price, stock status, barcode and main image from the page’s product data.
It identifies itself with this user agent:
MerchantGuardBot/1.0 (+https://merchant-guard.co.uk/bot)
How it behaves
- It only visits product pages that a Merchant Guard customer has listed in their own Google Merchant Center account, when that customer runs a check. It doesn’t crawl links or discover new pages.
- It makes a small number of requests at a time, with a 12-second timeout, and reads at most 2.5 MB of each page.
- It reads the page as published. It doesn’t run scripts, submit forms, log in or add items to a basket.
- It follows up to five redirects and never visits private or internal network addresses.
Blocking or allowing it
If your shop uses Merchant Guard, allowing MerchantGuardBot in your firewall or bot protection lets fixes read your pages reliably. If you don’t want it to visit your site, block the MerchantGuardBot user agent, or email support@merchant-guard.co.uk with your domain and we’ll exclude it.