A 403 (Forbidden) error means that Spotler Activate Search is unable to access your website. The server is actively denying the request, which prevents Activate Search from crawling or indexing your content.
Common cause and recommended action
The most common cause is that your website is protected by a firewall, security service, or CDN (such as Cloudflare), which blocks requests from external systems.
Please contact your website developer or hosting provider and ask them to investigate why requests from Spotler Activate Search are being blocked.
Possible Solution (Cloudflare)
If your website uses Cloudflare, the issue can often be resolved by whitelisting Spotler Search's crawler IP addresses in Cloudflare's security settings. Once the IP addresses have been added to the allowlist, Spotler Activate Search should be able to access the website again.
Check Cloudflare Security Events
Navigate to:
Security → Analytics → Events
Open the blocked request and verify:
Service: Bot fight mode Action taken: Managed Challenge
Example:
IP: 3.121.238.161 User agent: WebsightSearch/1.0
What is the root cause?
Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode identifies the Spotler crawler as automated traffic and serves a Managed Challenge. Since the crawler cannot complete the challenge, Cloudflare returns a 403 response instead of the XML feed.
What is the resolution?
Add the Spotler crawler IP addresses to the Cloudflare Allow List.
Spotler crawler IPs
18.157.191.234 52.28.204.192 3.121.238.161
Cloudflare Configuration
Navigate to:
Security → WAF → Tools → IP Access Rules
Create an Allow rule for each Spotler IP.
Recommended scope:
This website
Action:
Allow
Notes
- A Cloudflare Skip Rule for the feed path may not resolve the issue when the request is challenged by Bot Fight Mode.
- During testing, Bot Fight Mode continued to challenge Spotler requests until the Spotler IP addresses were explicitly allowlisted.
- If the feed remains inaccessible after allowlisting, review Cloudflare Security Events to determine whether another security feature (custom rule, managed rule, rate limit, etc.) is responsible.