What is AhrefsBot?

AhrefsBot is the web crawler operated by Ahrefs, a popular SEO tool company. It crawls the web to build Ahrefs’ massive backlink index and provide competitive intelligence data to their users.

How AhrefsBot Works

AhrefsBot continuously crawls billions of web pages to:

  • Discover and map backlinks
  • Index web content
  • Track changes to pages
  • Monitor link profiles
  • Build search index for Ahrefs’ tools

User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)

Is AhrefsBot Good or Bad?

Pros:

  • Helps SEO professionals understand backlink profiles
  • Respects robots.txt
  • Provides useful competitive data
  • Generally well-behaved crawler

Cons:

  • Can consume significant bandwidth
  • Crawls frequently
  • Provides data to your competitors
  • Not a search engine (won’t help rankings)

Should You Block AhrefsBot?

This depends on your priorities:

Allow if:

  • You want your backlinks visible in Ahrefs
  • You use Ahrefs for your own SEO research
  • Bandwidth isn’t a major concern
  • You want maximum visibility

Block if:

  • You have limited server resources
  • You want to hide your link profile from competitors
  • You prefer to keep your SEO strategy private
  • You don’t use Ahrefs tools

How to Block AhrefsBot

Add to your robots.txt:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

Or block specific sections:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /

Crawl Rate

AhrefsBot is one of the most aggressive crawlers. It can:

  • Make thousands of requests per day
  • Crawl sites very frequently
  • Consume significant bandwidth

If you allow it but want to limit impact:

  1. Use robots.txt crawl-delay (not all crawlers respect this):
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-delay: 10

  1. Rate limit at server level using firewall/nginx rules

  2. Contact Ahrefs support to request lower crawl rate

Detecting AhrefsBot

Check server logs for:

  • User agent containing “AhrefsBot”
  • IPs from Ahrefs IP ranges
  • High frequency requests

Verify legitimacy with reverse DNS lookup - should resolve to *.ahrefs.com

Alternatives

Other similar SEO crawler bots:

  • SemrushBot - Semrush’s crawler
  • Moz DotBot - Moz’s crawler
  • Majestic - MJ12bot crawler

Many sites block these crawlers to conserve resources and maintain competitive privacy while allowing only search engine bots like Googlebot.

Impact on Performance

A typical website might see:

  • 1000-5000+ requests per day from AhrefsBot
  • 100-500MB+ bandwidth usage
  • Potential server load during peak crawl times

Monitor your server logs to assess actual impact on your site.

Conclusion

AhrefsBot is a legitimate but aggressive crawler. Your decision to allow or block it should balance the value of appearing in Ahrefs’ index against the server resources it consumes. Many sites choose to block third-party SEO crawlers and allow only search engine bots.

Test AhrefsBot Access to Your Site

Use our SEO Tools Bot Checker to verify if AhrefsBot can access your website. This free tool tests robots.txt rules and actual bot access for Ahrefs and other SEO analytics crawlers.

Related SEO Tool Bots:

  • MJ12bot - Majestic backlink analysis crawler
  • SemrushBot - SEMrush competitive analysis bot
  • DotBot - Moz domain authority crawler

For comprehensive bot testing across all categories, explore our free bot detection tools.