dotbot

Last updated 20 hours ago.

dotbot is an SEO crawler operated by Moz. It's not currently known to be artificially intelligent or AI-related. If you think that's incorrect or can provide more detail about its purpose, please contact us.

You can set up agent analytics to see when dotbot visits your website.

Detail

Operator	Moz
Documentation	https://moz.com/help/moz-procedures/crawlers/dotbot

Type

SEO Crawler

Discovers search engine optimization insights

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.

Insights

dotbot Visiting Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with the API or WordPress plugin.

Set Up Agent Analytics

Other Websites

2% of top websites are blocking dotbot

Learn How →

Access Control

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.

Using Robots.txt

You can block dotbot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. We recommend setting up agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent Token	Description
`dotbot`	Should match instances of dotbot

# robots.txt
# This should block dotbot

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

Instead of doing this manually, you can use the API or Wordpress plugin to keep your robots.txt updated with the latest known AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt