Ahrefs Bot: What it is, How it Crawls & How to Control it

If you see AhrefsBot or Ahrefs bot hitting your server logs, that’s Ahrefs’ own web crawler (here are all the Ahrefs bots). It powers their SEO tools and the Yep search engine, and it’s one of the most active SEO crawlers on the web.

This guide explains what Ahrefs Bot is for, its bot names and user-agents, how to block, deny or limit Ahrefs Bot, what to do if the Ahrefs audit bot is blocked, how Ahrefs crawl bot IPs work, and how to get Ahrefs Bot to crawl your site.

What Is Ahrefs Bot (AhrefsBot)?

Ahrefs Bot (user-agent: AhrefsBot) is a web crawler operated by Ahrefs. It crawls the web 24/7 to build and update their backlink and content index, which powers tools like Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer and Site Audit.

Key facts about AhrefsBot:

• It’s one of the most active crawlers on the internet, crawling around 5 million pages per minute.
• Third-party summaries report that AhrefsBot visits over 8 billion pages per day, updating its index every 15–30 minutes, and is the third most active crawler after Google and Bing.
• It powers both Ahrefs’ marketing intelligence platform and Yep.com, Ahrefs’ privacy-focused search engine.

As a “good bot”, AhrefsBot follows robots.txt rules, does not trigger ads, and doesn’t appear as normal user traffic in Google Analytics.

What Is Ahrefs Bot For?

If you’re asking “what is Ahrefs bot for?”, the answer is: SEO data.

Ahrefs Bot is primarily used to:

• Build a massive backlink index used in Ahrefs tools, so SEOs can analyze link profiles, spot toxic links, and find new link opportunities.
• Collect data for keyword and content analysis (URLs, titles, headers, anchor text, etc.) that feeds tools like Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer.
• Index content for Yep.com, allowing your pages to appear in that search engine’s results.

Practically, the more accurately AhrefsBot can crawl your site, the better your Ahrefs data (and reports that use it) will be.

Ahrefs Bot Names, User-Agents & IP Addresses

When people say “Ahrefs bot name”, they usually mean the user-agent tokens you see in logs and robots.txt.

Main Ahrefs bot name: AhrefsBot

Core crawler:

• User-agent name: AhrefsBot
• Full user-agent string (example):
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)

That +http://ahrefs.com/robot/ part is why you’ll often see searches like “ahrefsbot http ahrefs robot” – it’s the reference URL in the user-agent string.

AhrefsSiteAudit (the “Ahrefs audit bot”)

Ahrefs also runs a separate crawler for Site Audit:

• User-agent name: AhrefsSiteAudit
• Desktop user-agent example:
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsSiteAudit/6.1; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/site-audit)

You’ll see this when running Site Audit on your own site.

Ahrefs crawl bot IPs and verification

Ahrefs publishes the official IP ranges their bots crawl from, plus individual IPs and reverse DNS rules:

• You can fetch AhrefsBot IP ranges and individual IPs via Ahrefs’ public API endpoints.
• Reverse DNS for legit AhrefsBot traffic ends with ahrefs.com or ahrefs.net.

This is how you verify ahrefs crawl bot IP traffic in your logs and distinguish the real bot from scrapers spoofing the user-agent.

How Ahrefs Bot Crawls Your Site (Robots.txt, Crawl-Delay & Politeness)

Ahrefs runs two primary web crawlers – AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit – with the explicit goal of helping site owners improve their presence while minimizing server load.

Core behavior:

• Obeys robots.txt (allow/disallow rules) for AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit.
• Obeys Crawl-delay directives on HTML requests, respecting your rate limits.
• Reduces crawling speed when it sees many 4xx/5xx errors from your server.
• Caches assets (images, CSS, JS) to avoid hitting them repeatedly.
• Is listed as a verified “good bot” by Cloudflare.

So, by default, AhrefsBot is designed to be a polite crawler you manage through standard technical SEO controls.

How to Block or Deny Ahrefs Bot

If you decide you want to block Ahrefs bot or deny Ahrefs bot (not recommended unless you have strong reasons), the cleanest way is via robots.txt.

⚠️ Blocking AhrefsBot means losing Ahrefs link & SEO data for your domain, and your pages may disappear from Ahrefs reports.

Block AhrefsBot via robots.txt (ahrefs bot disallow)

To deny Ahrefs Bot completely:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

To block both the main crawler and the Ahrefs audit bot:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsSiteAudit
Disallow: /

Ahrefs’ own documentation states that using Disallow: rules in robots.txt is the standard way to stop AhrefsBot or AhrefsSiteAudit from visiting your site or a section of it.

To block only parts of your site (e.g. admin or private paths) while still allowing most crawling:

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

This is usually better than a full ahrefs bot disallow for most sites.

Block AhrefsBot by IP / firewall (last resort)

If you must block Ahrefs Bot at server or firewall level:

1. Use Ahrefs’ published IP ranges as the allow/deny list.
2. Confirm via reverse DNS that IPs resolve to ahrefs.com / ahrefs.net.

However, IP blocking is harder to maintain than robots.txt and can interfere with your Ahrefs data. Use it only if robots.txt is not enough (for example, on highly sensitive infrastructure).

How to Limit Ahrefs Bot Instead of Blocking It

In many cases you don’t want to block Ahrefs bot completely; you just want to limit Ahrefs Bot so it doesn’t put pressure on your server.

Use Crawl-delay in robots.txt

Ahrefs explicitly supports Crawl-delay for both AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit.

Example: slow AhrefsBot down to 1 URL every 10 seconds:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-delay: 10

You can combine this with disallows:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /admin/

Let Ahrefs auto-throttle on errors

If your site returns many 4xx or 5xx responses, Ahrefs’ documentation says the bot automatically reduces crawl speed for that site.

This can be used temporarily during outages or heavy maintenance, but don’t rely on error responses as a permanent control – they also harm other bots and users.

Adjust speed in Site Audit

For AhrefsSiteAudit, Ahrefs enforces a default limit (e.g. 30 URLs/min) and lets verified site owners raise or lower the speed inside the tool.

That’s the safest way to “limit Ahrefs bot” in the context of audit crawls.

Fixing “Ahrefs audit bot blocked” & Other Crawl Issues

If you see messages like “Ahrefs audit bot blocked” or notice that Ahrefs shows 0 crawled pages for your site, there are a few common causes.

Ahrefs’ official help article on enabling AhrefsBot lists the main reasons and fixes:

1. Robots.txt rules that block AhrefsBot

If your robots.txt contains:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

or similar, Ahrefs can’t crawl you.

Fix: remove or soften that rule, or explicitly allow the bot:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Allow: /

2. Robots.txt not accessible (404 / misconfigured)

If AhrefsBot gets 404 for robots.txt, crawling is technically allowed, but if your pages also return 404 then it can’t index titles/content at all.

Fix:

• Make sure https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt returns 200.
• Ensure your main pages return 200, not 404/410/5xx.

3. Server-level IP block (403, 406, WAF, CDN)

If your server, firewall or CDN blocks Ahrefs crawl bot IPs or user-agent, AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit cannot reach your site. This often shows as 403 Forbidden or 406 Not Acceptable for AhrefsBot only.

Examples that may block AhrefsBot:

• ModSecurity rules
• Security plugins
• WAF/CDN configs (Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc.)

Fix:

• Whitelist AhrefsBot user-agent and official Ahrefs IP ranges in your firewall or CDN.
• If you can’t change it yourself, send a support ticket using Ahrefs’ suggested template referencing https://ahrefs.com/robot.

Once robots and firewalls are fixed, AhrefsBot should resume crawling in the next crawl cycle.

Ahrefs Crawl Bot IP: How to Check & Use It

If you want to audit or filter Ahrefs crawl bot IP traffic:

1. Pull the official IP list from Ahrefs’ API (IP ranges or individual IPs).
2. Reverse-DNS check suspicious IPs to ensure the hostname ends with ahrefs.com or ahrefs.net.
3. Use the list to:
   • Whitelist AhrefsBot in your firewall/CDN.
   • Or, if necessary, apply rate limits/blocks only to legitimate Ahrefs traffic, not all bots.

This is safer and more precise than blocking by user-agent only (which is easy to spoof).

How Do I Get Ahrefs Bot to Crawl My Site?

If you’re specifically wondering “how do I get Ahrefs bot to crawl my site”, follow this checklist, based on Ahrefs’ own help center.

1. Allow AhrefsBot in robots.txt

Make sure you do not deny Ahrefs Bot. At minimum, you can explicitly allow it:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Allow: /

If you previously used Disallow: / for AhrefsBot, remove that.

2. Check your site in Ahrefs’ robots checker

Use Ahrefs’ robots status checker (linked from ahrefs.com/robot) to confirm that AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit can crawl your site.

3. Remove IP / firewall blocks

• Whitelist AhrefsBot and the official Ahrefs IPs in your hosting, firewall, security plugin, and CDN.

If a provider is blocking Ahrefs and you can’t change it, contact them with a support message referencing Ahrefs’ bot documentation and asking for AhrefsBot to be unblocked.

4. Fix basic HTTP errors

• Ensure your main pages return HTTP 200, not 4xx/5xx.
• Avoid long periods where the whole site returns 500/503; AhrefsBot will back off when it sees many errors.

5. (Optional) Verify your site in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs’ bots documentation notes that website owners can create a free Ahrefs webmaster account and verify their domains to see deeper data and run Site Audit.

While verification doesn’t “force” crawling, it helps you:

• See if and how Ahrefs is crawling your site.
• Run Site Audit and tune crawl speed for your own scans.

FAQ About Ahrefs Bot

Is Ahrefs Bot safe?

Yes. AhrefsBot is an established SEO crawler, recognized as a verified good bot by Cloudflare, and designed to respect robots.txt, crawl-delay, and server load.

Should I block Ahrefs Bot?

Usually no:

• Blocking AhrefsBot means no fresh backlink/SEO data in Ahrefs for your domain.
• Only block or deny Ahrefs bot if you truly don’t want it to see any part of your site.

Otherwise, limit AhrefsBot via Crawl-delay or path-specific Disallow rules instead of a full block.

Is Ahrefs Bot a search engine crawler?

Partly:

• It’s primarily an SEO tool crawler, powering Ahrefs’ link and content index.
• It also feeds Yep.com, a search engine that shares revenue with content creators.

How often does Ahrefs Bot crawl my site?

AhrefsBot as a whole: Crawls billions of pages per day and updates its index roughly every 15–30 minutes.

Frequency per site depends on:

• Your site’s authority & link profile
• How often does your content change
• Your robots.txt and crawl-delay settings
• Any errors or blocks Ahrefs encounters

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