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.
From their suggestion page:
The technology has to be discoverable in either the page body, cookies or server headers.
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.
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
Builtwith.com provide a link to block your site from their lookup service:
As others have pointed out, this does not prevent other services or methods of finding out what tech your site uses, but this essentially answers your main question.
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.
