How to handle Pingdom's bot in robots.txt
Pingdom is an uptime and performance monitoring service whose checks fetch your pages on a schedule. This page explains why robots.txt is not the right tool to stop monitoring requests, how Pingdom identifies itself, and how to exclude it cleanly from analytics.
Why robots.txt is the wrong lever
Pingdom checks exist to confirm a specific URL responds. A monitoring service generally fetches the exact endpoint you configured regardless of robots.txt, because its job is availability, not indexing. So a Disallow will not reliably stop the checks and is not the intended control.
If you genuinely do not want a monitor hitting a path, remove or reconfigure the check in Pingdom itself — that is the authoritative control, not robots.txt.
- Pingdom monitors availability, not search indexing
- robots.txt does not reliably stop a configured check
- Reconfigure the monitor in Pingdom to change behavior
Identify and exclude cleanly
Pingdom's checks carry a self-identifying user agent. Use it to keep monitoring requests out of analytics rather than trying to block them. In WebmasterID this happens by classification; in raw logs you would filter on the Pingdom token.
If you must reduce load, the right approach is fewer or less-frequent checks in the Pingdom dashboard, not a robots.txt rule a monitoring fetch may ignore.
How it appears in analytics and logs
Regular, evenly spaced hits from a Pingdom user agent are scheduled uptime checks, not real visits or search crawling. They confirm your monitor is running, not audience activity.
Diagnostic use case
Decide how to treat Pingdom's monitoring requests — keep them for uptime checks while excluding them from human analytics and crawl-budget concerns.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies Pingdom as a monitoring bot, so its scheduled checks are separated from human analytics automatically rather than inflating page-view counts.
Common mistakes
- Adding a Disallow and assuming Pingdom checks will stop.
- Counting evenly spaced Pingdom hits as real visits.
- Trying to throttle monitoring with crawl-delay instead of the dashboard.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Pingdom requests are machine checks of your own monitors, not people. Matching them relies on the user agent only; no visitor data is involved.
Related pages
- Pingdom bot — uptime/performance monitor
Pingdom (SolarWinds) is an uptime and performance monitoring service that fetches your pages on a schedule to check availability and speed. Its requests are automated monitoring, not search indexing or human visits. Pingdom documents its checks and the identifiers operators can use to recognise them.
- How to handle UptimeRobot in robots.txt
UptimeRobot is an uptime monitoring service that pings configured URLs on an interval. This page explains why robots.txt is not the right way to stop its checks, how UptimeRobot identifies itself, and how to exclude it from analytics cleanly.
- robots.txt vs the meta robots tag
robots.txt and the meta robots tag solve different problems. robots.txt asks crawlers not to fetch a path; the meta robots tag, embedded in a page's HTML, tells search engines whether to index it. The classic mistake is using Disallow to remove a page from search — which can backfire.
- Bot vs human
See monitoring checks like Pingdom separated from people.
Sources and verification notes
- Google — How Google interprets robots.txtrobots.txt is a request to compliant crawlers; monitors fetch fixed endpoints.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.