About the LatchScale scanner

If you found LatchScaleScanner in your server logs, this page explains what it was doing. LatchScale helps freelance advertising specialists find local businesses whose websites could convert more of their visitors. To do that, it reads a few public pages of a business's website the same way a browser would.

What it requests

• /robots.txt, then the homepage, then up to 3 more pages on the same site: typically the contact, booking and about pages.
• If the pages load a Google Tag Manager container, the public container script from googletagmanager.com.
• Nothing else: no forms are submitted, no logins attempted, no files downloaded.

How it behaves

• It identifies itself as LatchScaleScanner/0.1 (+https://latchscale.com/scanner).
• At most one request per second to any host, and a 10-second limit per request.
• It follows robots.txt, including rules that apply only to it, and re-checks robots.txt on every redirect.
• A site is revisited at most once every 30 days.

What it keeps

Only yes/no findings about the site itself: whether it uses HTTPS, works on phones, has a page title and description, loads common advertising or analytics tags, offers a way to call, message, chat or book, which website builder it runs on, and whether it carries schema.org structured data. Page content is not stored, and the scanner does not collect names, personal email addresses or anything about individual people.

How to block it

Add these lines to your robots.txt. They take effect the next time we visit.

User-agent: LatchScaleScanner
Disallow: /

Removal requests can also be sent through the contact details on our privacy page. See data attribution for where business listings come from.