Bots & Crawlers
Block spy extensions and image crawlers
Overview
Bots & Crawlers protection blocks automated tools and browser extensions that competitors use to spy on your store or scrape your images. These features require the Advanced plan.
Hide Source Code
Prevents visitors from viewing your page source code using Ctrl+U / Cmd+U or the browser's "View Page Source" option. This makes it harder to extract image URLs, product data, or other information from your page markup.
Block Spy Extensions
Detects and blocks popular competitor intelligence browser extensions:
- PPSPY — analyzes store traffic, revenue, and best-selling products
- Koala Inspector — inspects Shopify store themes, apps, and settings
- ShopHunt — tracks competitor product changes and pricing
When a spy extension is detected, Photolock can block it from collecting data about your store.
Crawler Blocking
Controls which search engine and social media crawlers can index your images. This is useful if you want to prevent your product images from appearing in image search results or social media previews.
| Crawler | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Google Image Crawler | Prevents Google from indexing your images in Google Images |
| Bing Image Crawler | Prevents Bing from indexing your images |
| Twitter Crawler | Prevents Twitter/X from creating image previews when your URLs are shared |
| Pinterest Crawler | Prevents Pinterest from saving or pinning your images |
Important: Blocking crawlers affects your store's visibility in image search results and social previews. Only enable crawler blocking if preventing image indexing is more important than the traffic these sources provide.
Enabling Bots & Crawlers Protection
- Open the Photolock app
- Go to Settings > Bots & Crawlers
- Toggle on the features you want
- Click Save