LighthouseLocal Bot: The Crawler Behind Your Audit.

This page documents LighthouseLocalBot for site owners and AI assistants: what it is, the user-agent strings it sends, what it fetches, how to block it, and how to verify its requests.

What LighthouseLocal Bot is.

Operated by Rhetor, LighthouseLocal Bot powers Lighthouse Local's website audits and AI-search-visibility checks. It crawls a site only when the site owner, or their agency, requests an audit of that site. It is not a broad web crawler, and it does not build a search index or train models.

Key facts.

Operator: Rhetor
Purpose: Powers Lighthouse Local's website audits and AI-search-visibility checks.
Trigger: Only when the site owner, or their agency, requests an audit of that site — not a broad web crawler.
Robots.txt token: LighthouseLocalBot
Verification: Every request is cryptographically signed per Web Bot Auth (RFC 9421).

User-agent strings.

Every request carries one of these User-Agent strings, depending on which product triggered the audit.

Base, No Product Specified

LighthouseLocalBot/1.0 (+https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/bot)

AI Visibility Tracker Audits

LighthouseLocalBot/1.0 (lighthouse; +https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/bot)

Beacon Audits

LighthouseLocalBot/1.0 (seo-report; +https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/bot)

What it fetches.

LighthouseLocalBot fetches a site's homepage, robots.txt, llms.txt, and sitemap for every audit, plus a sample of up to 12 additional pages (4 concurrent requests) for deeper analysis.

The homepage and robots.txt are fetched regardless ofDisallow rules, since the requested audit depends on them. The page sample honors robots.txtDisallow rules, matched against LighthouseLocalBot and falling back to * when no bot-specific group exists.

Blocking LighthouseLocalBot.

To stop the page-sample crawl on your site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: LighthouseLocalBot
Disallow: /

Lighthouse Local customer whose audit is being blocked? See Allow our crawler through your firewall.

Verifying requests.

Every request is cryptographically signed per Web Bot Auth (RFC 9421 HTTP message signatures), so you can confirm a request claiming to be LighthouseLocalBot actually is one. The public key directory is published at www.lighthouselocal.ai/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

Questions about this crawler.

Email support@rhetor.ai with any questions about this crawler.