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Out of curiosity, does anyone know how builtwith.com works? How does it identify the platform or app a website is using? And most importantly does anyone know how to hide the details from it?

Somehow I'm not very comfortable with users being able to identify the platform I am in.

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3 Answers 3

up vote 7 down vote accepted

From their suggestion page:


In theory, this could also involve things like testing known locations, such as http://example.com/wp-admin/

Most applications let you hide various bits of such identifying information, but on the whole: get over it if not. Hiding what apps you use isn't going to make nearly as much difference as keeping them up to date and secure.

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There is a meta tag "generator" which they are probably looking for, as that gives a fairly definitive answer, if present. –  paulmorriss Jul 13 '12 at 8:18
Thanks for your input Su! I guess i shouldn't be such a a paranoid :) –  bernie Jul 17 '12 at 2:44
I have changed my default link and built with still has the information about my website –  c s h Jun 6 '13 at 21:04

I think they test some path those are unique path for CMSs and index your website info in their databases. I try to use "IP Deny Manager" in Cpanel to denny IP of those domains in order to prevents from unwanted indexing by those sites.

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If you are using Apache, you can turn off its signature as detailed on this page: http://www.shanison.com/2012/07/05/unset-apache-response-header-protect-your-server-information/

Sites can tell what server software you are running through the Server and X-Powered-By headers, as well as by message placed on error pages by the server. Use the following directives in httpd.conf to turn them off:

ServerSignature Off
ServerTokens Prod
Header unset Server  
Header unset X-Powered-By

For the Header command to be used, you'll need to be running Apache 2.x or higher with mod_headers enabled:

LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so  
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