Peax opens a page of a website when a person asks it to: to preview a cookie banner over their own site in Peax Studio, or to check what a page does with cookies and trackers before and after a visitor answers its banner. It opens that one page, as a visitor would, and does not crawl.
Its user agent is Chrome's, followed by Peax's product token:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/151.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Peax/1.0 (+peax.co)
Every request it makes is signed with Web Bot Auth: its Signature-Agent is "https://agent.peax.co", and its key is published at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. A request that says it is Peax without a valid signature is not Peax.
It does not hide that it is automated: navigator.webdriver is true in it.
It reads a site's robots.txt before it opens a page, and opens none it is asked not to, by the Peax group, or the * group when there is none for Peax. To keep it out:
User-agent: Peax Disallow: /
To let it in where the * group keeps other tools out:
User-agent: Peax Allow: /
A site behind a bot check can let it through by its signature, or by a rule for the Peax/1.0 user agent.
Questions about a visit from the Peax browser: peax.co.