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AHREFSBOT

LOW RISK📊 SEO & DATA SCRAPER

Ahrefs SEO tool crawler — maps backlinks and site structure for SEO analysis

ORGANIZATION
Ahrefs
FIRST SEEN
2011-01
RESPECTS ROBOTS.TXT
✓ YES
DOCUMENTATION
ahrefs.com
—
DAILY VISITS
—
COUNTRIES ACTIVE
TRACKING
STATUS
—
LAST SEEN

📡 AHREFSBOT USER-AGENT STRING

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

This is the User-Agent header sent by AhrefsBot in HTTP requests. Use this to identify AhrefsBot in your server access logs.

📋 ABOUT AHREFSBOT

AhrefsBot is the web crawler behind Ahrefs, one of the most popular SEO analysis platforms used by digital marketers and webmasters worldwide. AhrefsBot continuously crawls the web to build and maintain one of the largest backlink indexes available, tracking links between websites to power Ahrefs' suite of SEO tools.

AhrefsBot focuses primarily on discovering and cataloging links between pages rather than extracting and storing full page content. This link-focused crawling strategy makes it particularly important for competitive SEO analysis and backlink monitoring. The crawler respects robots.txt directives and supports Crawl-delay for rate limiting.

NORAD.io monitors AhrefsBot as part of its SEO crawler tracking category. While AhrefsBot is generally low-risk and well-behaved, some site operators prefer to limit SEO tool crawlers to reduce server load. NORAD provides visibility into AhrefsBot crawl volumes and patterns to support these decisions.

🎯 HOW TO DETECT AHREFSBOT

  • ▸User-Agent contains 'AhrefsBot/7.0'
  • ▸Crawls from OVH and dedicated hosting IP ranges
  • ▸Focus on link discovery rather than full content extraction
  • ▸Respects Crawl-delay in robots.txt
  • ▸Verify at ahrefs.com/robot for official IP list

🌐 AHREFSBOT KNOWN IP RANGES

54.36.148.0/2454.36.149.0/2454.36.150.0/24195.154.122.0/24195.154.123.0/24

Use these CIDR ranges to verify AhrefsBot identity at the network level. Always combine with User-Agent verification for accurate detection.

🔄 CRAWL BEHAVIOR

Continuous crawling to maintain a comprehensive backlink index. Respectful crawl rates with robots.txt compliance. Focuses on discovering links between pages rather than content extraction. Can be rate-limited via robots.txt Crawl-delay.

PURPOSE

Builds and maintains Ahrefs' backlink index and SEO analysis database. Used by SEO professionals to analyze backlink profiles, keyword rankings, and competitive intelligence.

🤖 ROBOTS.TXT CONFIGURATION

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Allow: /
Crawl-delay: 10

# To block:
# User-agent: AhrefsBot
# Disallow: /

AhrefsBot respects robots.txt directives. Add this to your robots.txt file at the root of your domain.

→ Complete Guide: robots.txt for AI Bots

🗺️ WHERE IS AHREFSBOT ACTIVE?

🇺🇸
United States
🇨🇦
Canada
🇲🇽
Mexico
🇬🇹
Guatemala
🇨🇺
Cuba
🇭🇹
Haiti
🇩🇴
Dominican Republic
🇭🇳
Honduras
🇳🇮
Nicaragua
🇸🇻
El Salvador
🇨🇷
Costa Rica
🇵🇦
Panama

⚠️ RELATED THREATS

Prompt Injection

Attempts to override bot instructions via malicious content embedded in web pages

Data Exfiltration

Bots attempting to extract sensitive data from websites including PII and credentials

Credential Stuffing

Automated login attempts using leaked credentials from data breaches

Aggressive Content Scraping

Bots aggressively scraping content beyond robots.txt limits and ToS

📂 MORE 📊 SEO & DATA SCRAPERS

SemrushBotSemrushScrapyOpen SourcePython RequestsUnknowncURLOpen SourceMJ12botMajesticDotBotMoz

📚 RELATED GUIDES

How to Detect AI Bots →robots.txt for AI Bots →NORAD API Docs →

PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE

Deploy SiteTrust to monitor and control AI bot access to your site with the Agent Passport Standard.

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