Skip to content
Gangway

Crawler

GangwayBot

If GangwayBot turned up in your access logs, this page is the answer to "what was that and how do I stop it". Short version: it fetched your HTML, checked it against WCAG rules, and changed nothing. The robots.txt line that blocks it is at the bottom.

Who it belongs to

Gangway is a WCAG scanning and remediation-reporting tool for web agencies. GangwayBot is the only automated fetcher we run. It identifies itself in one of two forms:

GangwayBot/1.0 (+https://gangway.porthatch.app/bot)
GangwayBot/1.0 (+https://gangway.porthatch.app/bot; outreach-preview)

What the two forms mean

The first is a scan a Gangway customer asked for. Someone added your site to their workspace — usually the agency that builds or maintains it — and the scan crawls same-origin pages from the address they gave us. It re-runs monthly or weekly depending on their plan.

The second is us, not a customer, and nobody asked for it. Before we contact an agency we scan a single page — the homepage, once — so that we can point at something real instead of sending a template. We would rather say that plainly here than have you find it in a log and wonder. If you would prefer we did not, the robots.txt line below stops both.

What it actually does

  • Issues an ordinary GET for the page HTML, with a 15-second timeout.
  • Parses that HTML and evaluates it against accessibility rules. Deeper scans render the page and run axe-core against it.
  • Reads only. It never submits a form, never attempts a sign-in, and never sends anything but GET.
  • Stores the findings — rule id, CSS selector, severity — not a copy of your pages.
  • Refuses to resolve private, loopback and link-local addresses, so it cannot be pointed at anything on an internal network.

robots.txt

Customer scans fetch /robots.txt once per run and skip every path disallowed for GangwayBot, falling back to the * group when we are not named. The matcher is deliberately blunt: it understands Disallow, and it does not implement Allow exceptions or Crawl-delay. Where that is ambiguous it over-blocks rather than under-blocks.

How to block it

Add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: GangwayBot
Disallow: /

That covers both forms above. If you want to be removed and would rather not edit a file, mail support@porthatch.app with the domain and we will add it to our skip list — no reply needed beyond the address itself.

If it misbehaved

Excessive request rate, ignored robots rules, anything unexpected: send us the log lines at support@porthatch.app. A crawler that annoys the people it is meant to help is a bug, and we will treat it as one.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-04.