If you found LaunchPal-Check in your server logs, someone ran LaunchPal’s free launch check on your site.
What it does
LaunchPal helps first-time founders get their app ready to share. The check looks at a site the way a visitor or a search engine would: can Google read it, do shared links show a preview, does it load over https.
When it runs
Only when a person types an address into the check on launchpal.app. We don’t crawl the web or come back to sites on our own. If the same address was checked in the last 10 minutes, we show that result and fetch nothing.
What one check fetches
- the page that was entered
- the same address over http, to see if it redirects to https
- /robots.txt and the sitemap it lists, or /sitemap.xml
- the image used for link previews
- up to 3 of the page’s own scripts, to see which analytics tool it uses
That’s about 8 requests, read only, with time and size limits. Requests come from Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt. The speed test is run by Google PageSpeed Insights, so it appears in your logs as Google, not as us.
How to block it
Block the user agent LaunchPal-Check on your server or firewall. Because a person asks for each check, it doesn’t follow robots.txt rules. Google’s tools that fetch a page when someone asks work the same way.
Questions
Email hello@launchpal.app.