veri11yabout our `a11y-snapshot` crawler

You are probably here because you saw a11y-snapshot in your server logs, or received an email referencing this page. This explains exactly what it does and how to make it stop.

What it is

Veri11y operates an independent web accessibility testing practice. This crawler loads a small number of public pages on e-commerce storefronts and checks them against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the published technical standard for web accessibility. If it finds issues, we may send the store owner a free Snapshot describing them.

We are a private company. We are not a government agency, a regulator, or a law firm, and nothing we send is a legal notice.

What it does

Loads up to 5 public pages per site — typically the homepage, a collection page, a product page, and search results.
Sends one search term — the word "shirt" — to load a search results page. Searches are recorded by your store platform, so this term will appear in your own store analytics alongside your customers' searches.
May open a menu, drawer, or panel with the keyboard, and may select one filter on a collection page, to check whether those controls can be used with a keyboard at all. One filter, once, per page. Never a second filter, never a combination, never a sort control, and nothing that changes anything on your server.
Waits at least one second between requests to your server.
Scans a given site at most once every 30 days unless you are a client who asked for monitoring.
Reads the rendered page the same way a normal browser does, and takes screenshots of specific elements as evidence for any issue it reports.
Honors robots.txt.

What it never does

Log in, or attempt to access anything behind authentication.
Submit forms, place items in a cart, or create any state on your server.
Probe for security vulnerabilities, fuzz inputs, or test for exploits. It is an accessibility checker, not a security scanner.
Interact with CAPTCHAs or any bot-detection mechanism.
Touch your checkout. Scanning stops at the checkout handoff.
Collect personal data. It records accessibility findings about page markup — nothing about your customers.

How to stop it

Add this to your robots.txt and the crawler will not return:

robots.txt

User-agent: a11y-snapshot
Disallow: /

That is honored automatically on the next attempt, with no action needed from us. If you would rather just tell us, email omar@veri11y.com and we will remove your domain and stop contacting you.

Data we keep

Accessibility findings, the pages they were found on, screenshots of the specific elements involved, and the publicly listed business contact address used to reach you. Ask us to delete it and we will.