What is the Ahrefs bot? A complete guide

If you’ve ever taken a look at your website’s server logs, you might have noticed a visitor that shows up a lot: "AhrefsBot". Seeing a bot constantly crawling your site can feel a bit weird, but don't worry, this one is definitely one of the good guys. The Ahrefs bot is a web crawler that belongs to Ahrefs, one of the most popular SEO and marketing platforms around.

Think of it as a super-efficient librarian for the entire internet. Its main job is to visit web pages, read their content, and index them to build a huge, searchable database of the web. This bot is incredibly active. According to Cloudflare Radar, it’s the #1 most active SEO crawler online and the second most active bot overall, right behind Googlebot. It's also officially recognized by services like Cloudflare as a "good bot", so you can be sure it isn't up to anything malicious.

So, why is it on your site? It’s just doing its job of mapping the internet, and your site is a part of that map. The data it gathers is what powers the entire Ahrefs toolset and their own search engine, Yep.

In this guide, we'll cover what the Ahrefs bot actually does, how to confirm it's the real deal, and how you can manage its activity. Getting a handle on technical SEO like bot management is a great first step. Once that's sorted, the next challenge is creating plenty of great content for those bots to find. For that, tools like the eesel AI blog writer can help you scale up your content strategy without letting quality slip.

How the Ahrefs bot works

The Ahrefs bot has a simple but massive mission: crawl the entire web, 24/7, to find and index pages. And when I say massive, I mean it. This bot visits over 8 billion pages every 24 hours and refreshes its main index every 15 to 30 minutes. It’s a non-stop information-gathering machine.

Here’s a quick rundown of its process:

1. Discovery: The bot starts with a huge list of known URLs. As it crawls these pages, it follows the links it finds to discover new pages, pretty much how you would when clicking around a website.
2. Crawling: When it gets to a page, it downloads the raw HTML code.
3. Parsing: That raw data is sent to a parser, which pulls out all the important bits: links (both internal and external), text, headings, metadata, and more.
4. Indexing: This extracted information is then organized and added to Ahrefs' gigantic link index.

This constant cycle of discovery and indexing is what makes Ahrefs' tools so useful. When you use their Site Explorer to check a competitor’s backlinks or use Keywords Explorer to see who ranks for a term, you're using the data collected by this bot.

But the data isn't just for Ahrefs' paying customers. It also powers Yep.com, Ahrefs' privacy-focused search engine. By letting the Ahrefs bot crawl your site, you're making your content visible to a whole new audience that uses Yep. Basically, you're getting your pages included in another major search index for free.

AhrefsBot vs. AhrefsSiteAudit

It's easy to mix up the Ahrefs bots, but there are two main ones that do different things. They also follow slightly different rules, so knowing which is which can save you some confusion.

• AhrefsBot: This is the global web crawler we've been discussing. It roams the public internet constantly, building the main Ahrefs database and the Yep search index. It’s a good digital citizen and always follows the rules you set in your "robots.txt" file. No exceptions.
• AhrefsSiteAudit: This bot is more of a specialist. It only gets to work when an Ahrefs user decides to run a technical audit on a website using the Site Audit tool. By default, it also respects "robots.txt" rules. However, if you've verified that you own the website with Ahrefs, you can tell this bot to ignore those rules. This is really handy for finding orphaned pages or checking sections you might normally block from public bots.

Here’s a simple table to show the key differences:

How to identify legitimate Ahrefs bot traffic

Because Ahrefs is such a popular tool, some shady bots try to disguise themselves by faking their user agent to get past firewalls. Thankfully, there are a few easy ways to check that the traffic hitting your site is the real Ahrefs bot and not an imposter.

1. Check the User-Agent String: The official user agent for the bot is "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)". When you're writing rules in your "robots.txt" file, you only need to use the token "AhrefsBot". If you see a user agent that looks a little off or is misspelled, it's probably a fake.

2. Verify the IP Address: This is a more solid method. Ahrefs is open about where its bots crawl from and publishes a complete list of its IP ranges. If you see traffic claiming to be "AhrefsBot" coming from an IP address that isn't on this official list, you can safely block it.

3. Perform a Reverse DNS Lookup: This is the most reliable way to verify any bot. A reverse DNS lookup takes an IP address and finds the hostname connected to it. For the real Ahrefs bot, the IP address will always resolve to a hostname ending in "ahrefs.com" or "ahrefs.net". If it resolves to something else (or nothing), it's not the real deal.

Should you block the Ahrefs bot?

This is the big question. The short answer is: probably not. For most websites, the benefits of letting the Ahrefs bot do its thing far outweigh any potential downsides. But let's look at the pros and cons so you can make the right call.

Benefits of allowing the Ahrefs bot

Letting the Ahrefs bot crawl your site is generally a smart move for your SEO.

• Accurate SEO Data: Ahrefs is used by countless marketing teams, SEO agencies, and freelancers. If you block their bot, your site's data in their index will get stale. This means your backlink profile won't update, and any new keywords you rank for won't be tracked. Letting it crawl keeps your data fresh.
• Access to Free Tools: Ahrefs offers a great suite of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. It gives you access to a version of their Site Audit and Site Explorer tools, letting you check on your site's technical health and backlink profile without paying a dime. For these tools to work, the Ahrefs bot needs to be able to crawl your site.
• New Discovery Channels: Your content will get indexed in the Yep.com search engine. While it's not as big as Google, it's another way for people to find your content, and that's never a bad thing.
• Faster Indexing: Ahrefs is a partner in the IndexNow protocol, an initiative that lets websites instantly tell search engines about new or updated content. If your site uses IndexNow (which many modern CMS platforms do), allowing the bot can help your new pages get found and indexed much faster.

Reasons to control the Ahrefs bot

While blocking the bot completely is rarely a good idea, there are a few situations where you might want to limit its access.

• High Server Load: AhrefsBot is very active. If your website is on a cheap shared hosting plan with limited resources, the sheer number of requests from the bot could potentially slow your site down for human visitors.
• Strict Security Policies: Some corporate, government, or educational networks have tight security policies that block all non-essential web crawlers by default. In these cases, you might not have a choice.
• Firewall Misconfiguration: Sometimes, security tools can be a little too aggressive. There have been cases where users reported new Ahrefs IP ranges were blocked by Cloudflare services before being added to the verified list. This is rare, but it can happen.

In most cases, the issue isn't the bot itself, but how your server is handling its frequent crawling. The good news is, you don't have to choose between a complete block and a total free-for-all.

Practical ways to control the Ahrefs bot

Instead of just hitting the block button, you have several options to manage how the Ahrefs bot interacts with your site. This lets you get all the benefits while minimizing any potential strain on your server.

Method 1: Manage access with your robots.txt file

Your "robots.txt" file is the simplest way to communicate with web crawlers. It's a plain text file in your site's root directory that gives instructions to bots.

To slow down the crawler: If you're worried about server load, you can ask the bot to slow down using the "Crawl-Delay" directive. This tells the bot to wait a specific number of seconds between each request.

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-Delay: 5 

This example tells the bot to wait 5 seconds between each page crawl.

To block specific folders: You probably have parts of your site you don't want any bot to access, like admin pages, shopping carts, or internal search results. You can use the "Disallow" directive for this.

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /search/

To block it entirely: This should be a last resort, as it stops Ahrefs from updating your site's data. But if you have to, here’s how:

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

Method 2: Use server or firewall rules

For more direct control, you can manage bot traffic at the server level using your ".htaccess" file (for Apache servers), Nginx configuration, or through a Web Application Firewall (WAF) like Cloudflare.

Instead of trying to block bad bots, a better strategy is to explicitly allow the good ones. The best approach is to create an "Allow" rule for all of Ahrefs' official IP ranges. This ensures that the legitimate AhrefsBot can always access your site, while you can be more aggressive in blocking other, unknown traffic.

If you're a Cloudflare user, Ahrefs provides specific instructions on how to whitelist their IPs, which makes the process pretty straightforward.

Go beyond technical SEO: Automate content with the eesel AI blog writer

Getting a handle on bot traffic and making sure your site is technically sound is a huge part of SEO. But it's only half the battle. To actually rank and bring in traffic, you need a steady flow of high-quality, optimized content that both web crawlers and human readers will love.

This is where the eesel AI blog writer can make a real difference. It’s the exact tool we used here at eesel to grow our daily organic impressions from just 700 to over 750,000 in only three months.

Most AI writing tools just give you a generic first draft that you then have to spend hours researching, editing, and formatting. The eesel AI blog writer is different. It takes a single keyword or topic and generates a complete, publish-ready blog post that's actually designed to rank.

It was built for serious content marketers who need to scale without sacrificing quality. It comes packed with unique features you won't find in other tools:

• Automatic Asset Generation: It doesn't just write text. It creates relevant images, comparison tables, and charts to break up the content and make complex topics easier to digest.
• Rich Media Integration: To add authenticity, it can automatically embed relevant YouTube videos and pull real quotes and insights from Reddit threads related to your topic.
• AEO Optimization: The content is automatically structured with clear headings, lists, and FAQ sections, optimizing it for AI answer engines like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity.

Managing your technical SEO is smart. Automating your content creation is a superpower. It's completely free to try, so you can generate your first post and see the quality for yourself.

Seeing is believing. To get a better sense of just how active the AhrefsBot is and what that means in the broader ecosystem of web crawlers, check out this short video which breaks down its ranking as one of the world's most active bots.

This video breaks down why the Ahrefs bot is ranked as one of the world's most active web crawlers.

Final thoughts

The Ahrefs bot is a legitimate and important part of the modern SEO world. It's a powerful crawler that collects the data that helps millions of digital marketers, website owners, and content creators make better decisions.

While it's almost always a good idea to let it access your site, its high activity level means you might need to manage its behavior. Using your "robots.txt" file or firewall rules gives you the control you need to protect your server without losing out on the benefits.

Remember, a solid SEO strategy has two parts: smart technical management and consistent, high-quality content creation. Once you've set the rules for how bots should crawl your site, the next step is to give them something amazing to find.

Why not take the manual work out of that second part? Try the eesel AI blog writer for free and see how easy it can be to scale your content engine.