Why FlareWarden requested your website

The public checks

FlareWarden offers a few tools anyone can use, on its website or through AI assistants connected to FlareWarden's MCP server (a standard way for an assistant to use outside tools). A public check runs only when someone asks. It is never repeated on a schedule; continuous monitoring is something a site's own team sets up in a FlareWarden account, and it sends a different User-Agent.

Is It Down

Is It Down requests the address it was asked about once from each of 17 locations and reports, for each, whether the site answered, the HTTP status code and how long the answer took. One visitor can ask at most 5 times a minute; there is no separate limit for each site.

AI assistants

An assistant asking whether a site is up gets the same kind of answer, from 6 locations: Ashburn, San Jose, London, Frankfurt, Singapore and Sydney.

• A host is checked at most once every 5 minutes. Anyone who asks again in that time gets the earlier result, and a different query string does not start a new check.
• A domain and all of its subdomains together get at most 12 checks an hour, which is at most 72 requests an hour.

An assistant asking what to monitor on a site is shown whether it is up through these same checks and limits: asking both questions about one host within 5 minutes requests it once. A site is monitored only once a customer with an account sets it up, and from then on it is monitoring a customer set up, not a public check.

Site scans

The site scan, the scan on FlareWarden's home page, and an assistant asking what to monitor on a site each request the address once, from one location, and look up the domain's DNS records, to find which services the site uses (its hosting, CDN, payments, analytics and so on). The site scan also reads the public status pages of the services it finds. An assistant asking what to monitor also connects to the site once on port 443 to read when its certificate expires, and sends no request over that connection.

• One visitor can start at most 10 scans a minute on the website.
• The site scan's result is reused for 7 days, and an assistant's for 24 hours, so asking again in that time does not request your site again. Assistants together can start at most 200 new scans an hour.

What each request does

• One GET request for the address that was asked about, with no cookies, login details or form data.
• It follows at most 5 redirects.
• It reads at most 1 MB of the response. A check reads it only to measure it and discards it. A scan reads the page to find the services it uses, and shows the person who asked those services, the page's title and the checks that would suit it.
• It requests only the address it was given, the way a person opening the page would, so it does not read robots.txt.
• The person who asked never sees your server's IP addresses, and a check never shows them the page's content or its response headers.

What FlareWarden keeps

• Is It Down and the scan on the home page keep no result. The site scan's result, and an assistant's scan and check results, are kept under the site's name and reused for the times above.
• Unless someone asks for a site scan's report by email, nothing FlareWarden keeps about a public check records who asked; our privacy policy covers the email. The limits on how often one visitor can ask are counted by IP address in FlareWarden's servers' memory.
• The site scan sends your site's address, its page title and the services it found to Anthropic, which writes the summary the scan shows.

Where the requests come from

Public checks are sent from the same addresses as FlareWarden's monitoring, listed on FlareWarden's probes. If your firewall answers these requests with an error page, for example a 403, the person asking is told that your site answered but refused automated checks, never that it is down.

Stopping public checks of your site

Send us the domain you would like left out through the contact form, which opens on the Abuse Report topic, or email support@flarewarden.com. We may ask you to confirm that you run it. Use the same form to report someone misusing public checks against your site.

Once the domain is on our opt-out list, FlareWarden refuses every public check above of it and of every subdomain under it, and tells the person asking that the site's owner asked not to be checked. The list holds the domain, when it was added and why.