AhrefsBot
Ahrefs' SEO crawler building the world's largest backlink database.
What is AhrefsBot?
AhrefsBot is the web crawler for Ahrefs, one of the leading SEO tool providers. It builds and maintains one of the world's largest backlink indexes, crawling the web extensively to track links, discover content, and monitor site changes.
AhrefsBot is one of the most active SEO crawlers, with crawl rates that can impact server performance on smaller sites. It identifies itself clearly and respects robots.txt, including the crawl-delay directive. Ahrefs provides a way to verify authentic AhrefsBot requests.
For site owners, AhrefsBot activity has no direct SEO benefit — it's building Ahrefs' commercial database. However, blocking it may affect your ability to track your own backlinks and competitors' links in Ahrefs tools.
User-Agent Strings
These are the known user-agent patterns used by AhrefsBot. Use them to identify this crawler in your server logs or configure robots.txt rules.
robots.txt example:
User-agent: AhrefsBot Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
How to Manage AhrefsBot
No direct SEO benefit from allowing — it builds Ahrefs' commercial database.
Can be aggressive — use crawl-delay in robots.txt to throttle.
Blocking won't affect search rankings but may limit Ahrefs data about your site.
Use Switch to monitor crawl rates and set appropriate limits.
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