The Pharos agent
If you found this name in your site's logs, it's because someone asked for an analysis of that page. We are not exploring the web: we came once, on request. Here is what we fetch, what we don't do, and how to stop us.
How we introduce ourselves
One string, for every request Pharos makes on its own behalf.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pharos-Audit/1.3.0; +https://pharos.verso.solutions/bot)The token is “Pharos-Audit”. The version changes with each Pharos release, the name does not.
What we fetch
- The page the user pointed us at, once. We don't follow its links and we don't move on to other pages.
- Your
robots.txt, the declared sitemap, and the files meant for agents (llms.txt,.well-known). - One request per AI crawler we test for, sending its user-agent instead of ours: that is how we can tell you whether that bot would be turned away. So you will also see names like
GPTBotorClaudeBotcoming from our addresses. That is a probe, not that bot. - About twenty requests in all, within a few seconds, and then we leave.
What we don't do
- We don't come back on our own: there is no schedule, no repeat pass. We return only if someone asks for another analysis.
- We don't run JavaScript. We read the served HTML, the way an AI fetcher does.
- We don't keep your page's HTML. The report holds the signals we computed, not your content.
- We don't train models on your site, and we don't resell anything to anyone.
What about robots.txt?
For the page we are pointed at, we don't consult it, and we would rather tell you than let you find out. The reason is that a report which stops at robots.txt could not tell you the very thing it exists for: which bots you are blocking without knowing. It is the same choice Chrome-Lighthouse makes, analyzing the page you ask it to analyze. Naming us in there would not stop us: if you want to stop us, the line below actually does.
How to stop us
At the server or WAF level, on the user-agent. Example for nginx:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Pharos-Audit") { return 403; }If you block us, anyone trying to analyze your site with Pharos gets a report saying “unreachable”. Nothing else changes.
And “PharosBot”?
That is a name we are holding back, nobody uses it today. It will serve the day Pharos analyzes a whole site rather than a single page: there we would walk pages nobody pointed us at, and then robots.txt must be honored. Different things, different names. If you see PharosBot today, it isn't us.
Something looks wrong?
If Pharos-Audit behaved in a way you did not expect, write to us: that is how we fix it.