Ahrefsbot: Should You Block The Most Active Crawler Of The Industry?

As a digital marketing professional, it is imperative to have access to relevant and accurate data. This is where Ahrefsbot steps in, one of our strongest allies – the backbone that drives Ahrefs, one of the most comprehensive tools in the digital marketing industry currently. 

But we hardly ever talk about Ahrefsbot – in a world where relevant information can literally make or break your website strategy, understanding how this bot works, why it is essential, and most importantly, whether you should consider blocking it is crucial. 

And that is precisely why we are here – stay tuned for a complete breakdown of Ahrefsbot and whether you should block it from your website. 

What Is Ahrefsbot?

Ahrefs has its own web crawler, Ahrefsbot – the purpose? To power the vast database and link index of Ahrefs. To put it simply, this bot lies at the core of Ahrefs, one of the most powerful optimization tools in the industry currently. 

Over time, the robot was able to collect and add more than 12 trillion active links for the SEO tool. Naturally, this makes it clear as to why this bot is a vital part of the tool.

How Does Ahrefsbot Work?

Ahrefsbot has one work – to crawl all websites out there. It collects data on a range of quality links for each crawl, sending the information back to the tools’ database. 

So, Ahrefs is only able to show accurate information to users, offering detailed information on optimizing and marketing websites, thanks to Ahrefsbot. 

As per Ahrefs’ official documentation, Ahrefsbot:

• Crawls more than 6 billion pages on the internet every day. 
• Updates the tool’s link index database every 30 minutes. 

Whew! That does sound like plenty of power. 

The Benefits Of Ahrefsbot:

Ahrefsbot has two major functions:

1. To crawl your website.
2. To analyze your website.

Now, what does this bot exactly crawl and analyze?

• External links.
• Internal links.

After crawling and analyzing millions of websites, the bot adds the same to the ever-growing database of Ahrefs. 

But how does allowing Ahrefsbot to crawl your website benefit YOU? 

So, did you know that the data Ahrefsbot collects offers plenty of value to both marketing and SEO communities? This data typically SEO and digital marketing professionals understand how to improve their optimization strategies for search engine giants like Google. 

As a result, if you enable this bot to crawl and analyze your website then you will always get accurate data about your website. Moreover, you will also be able to compare your website with its competitors. 

So, this will help you to:

• Optimize your website. 
• Prioritize what you need to rank higher. 

Is Ahrefsbot Good For Your Website?

There are several bots online who does a similar kind of function like Ahrefs. In this context, the most common types of bots are as follows:

1. Feed Fetchers: Feedburner, X, and Facebook Mobile. 
2. Search Engine Bots: Yahoobot, Bingbot, and Googlebot. 
3. Monitoring Bots: Uptimer and WordPress.
4. Commercial Bots: GPTBot, Semrushbot, and Ahrefsbot.

These bots are the power behind different applications, making them useful for us. So, all bots that add value to the user are known as ‘good’ bots. In contrast, the digital landscape is not immune to the ‘bad’ bots typically responsible for:

• Spam traffic.
• Content scraping.
• Credential stuffing.

Moreover, ‘bad’ bots can use tons of server bandwidth, causing plenty of chaos on a website. 

So, while Ahrefsbot is primarily a ‘good’ bot trying to do its best – not everything about it happens to be perfect. Yep! The bot can potentially be put to use for ‘bad’ activities on the internet. 

What Issues Can Ahrefsbot Cause On Your Website?

As with most things, there are some downsides that Ahrefsbot has – and you have to be familiar with these potential downsides. Moreover, each of these problems can lead to unwanted problems on your website that might not just be worth the risk. 

1. It Can Make Your Website Slow:

Nobody really likes a website that takes time to load – right? So, whenever Ahrefsbot can crawl your website, it will load like how it usually does under normal circumstances, using too much bandwidth. This means the website will load slowly for some visitors.

Considering how speed is a significant ranking factor for Google, it can negatively impact your website’s user experience. 

2. Does It Respect robot.txt?

Ahrefs is solid with its claim that its bot has respect for robots.txt. In fact, the powerful SEO tool has often said how its bot follows allow and disallow rules. 

But, here’s the issue:

Some users have been saying that this is not really true. So, even after they added robots.txt to their websites, they saw that they had still been getting traffic from Ahrefs’ bot. 

Now, if Ahrefsbot is not following the rules of robots.text then it becomes a marker of bad bots – it’s an absolute bad bot.

Not obeying robots.txt rules is a sign of a bad bot. Red flag!

3. Spammers Can Use Ahrefsbot:

We all hate spammers – it’s pretty much universal. Sadly, they very much exist and we need to be familiar with these as website owners. 

There can be nothing worse than getting thousands of unwanted referral traffic on your website. So, this kind of spammy traffic not only clogs up a website’s Google Analytics data but also its overall performance.

Moreover, spammers can easily imitate the user agent of Ahrefsbot to:

• Scrape your website’s data or content. 
• Send inorganic referral traffic. 
• Spam your website continuously.

So, if you find out that you are getting lots of traffic frequently from Ahrefsbot then it is best to review as well as compare the same with Ahref’s official IP address range. 

Should You Consider Blocking Ahrefsbot?

This question is good – should you block this bot? Or should you not?

So, if you are using Ahref as an SEO tool for your daily operations, it is best to not block Ahrefsbot. This is because it will interfere with your website getting updated accurately on Ahref’s database. 

However, if you are not using Ahrefs as a tool and you feel its bot is harming your website then you can go ahead with blocking it. 

So, you just need to ask yourself one important question: is this beneficial for my website? Or will it negatively impact my website? It is easy to figure out the answer to this question by just checking your website’s access logs.