DotBot

What is DotBot?

About

DotBot is Moz's web crawler that gathers web data for the Moz Link Index, providing data used in Moz Pro campaigns, Link Explorer, and the Moz Links API to analyze website backlinks and SEO metrics. You can see how often DotBot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Expected Behavior

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) crawlers do not adhere to a fixed visitation schedule for websites. The frequency of visits varies widely based on several factors, including the search keywords it ranks for, and how many other websites link to it.

Type

SEO Crawler
Discovers search engine optimization insights

Detail

Operated By Moz
Last Updated 16 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

3%
3% of top websites are blocking DotBot
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
DotBot normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from SEO Crawlers

Top Visited Website Categories

Sports
Internet and Telecom
Travel and Transportation
Food and Drink
Health
How Do I Get These Insights for My Website?
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

Robots.txt

Should I Block DotBot?

Probably not, especially if you benefit from an SEO service yourself. However, you might choose to block them if you're concerned about things like server resource usage.

How Do I Block DotBot?

You can block DotBot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

How Do I Block All SEO Crawlers?
Serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new SEO crawlers automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt
User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.2; +https://opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot; help@moz.com) 
# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: DotBot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/dotbot
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References