Leaderboard grows to 300 sites, and a straight answer when bot protection blocks us
The public leaderboard now ranks up to 300 audited sites. And when Cloudflare or another bot shield challenges our crawler, the audit stops and tells you exactly what to allow, instead of failing vaguely or scoring the verification screen.
300 sites on the leaderboard
The leaderboard ranked the top 100 audited sites. It now ranks up to 300 — every domain with a completed audit, ordered by its latest Growth Score, with the per-type boards (SaaS, e-commerce, agencies, travel and the rest) drawing from the same pool. Links to listed sites are followed links.
When bot protection gets in the way
Some sites answer a crawler with a verification screen instead of the page — Cloudflare's "Under Attack" mode and managed challenges, DDoS-Guard, Incapsula, DataDome and similar. Until now that went two bad ways: a challenge served as HTTP 503 was reported as "this site is returning a server error", and one served as 403 slipped through and was audited as if the "Just a moment..." screen were your homepage.
Now we recognise the screen for what it is, try once more the way a browser would, and if that is challenged too the audit stops before it starts with a message naming who blocked us and what to do:
Cloudflare challenged our crawler on example.com (HTTP 503), so we can't read the page — an audit would score the verification screen, not your site. Allow our crawler and try again: every request we make identifies as "WebmatikBot" (Cloudflare: Security → WAF → Custom rules → Skip when User Agent contains "WebmatikBot"), or switch off "Under Attack" mode while the audit runs.
That last part is new too. Everything Webmatik fetches — the page, the screenshots, link checks, the site cards on the leaderboard — now identifies itself with the same WebmatikBot token, so a single allow rule covers all of it.
Also fixed
- Featured cards on the leaderboard no longer pick up an interstitial's title. If a site is mid-challenge when we look, the card keeps the last name we read.
- Scheduled monitoring re-audits keep the site type your last full audit established, instead of re-guessing it from the HTML each week. The guess disagreed often enough to move a score by ten points on the same unchanged site.
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