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 4 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
Science
Food and Drink
Arts and Entertainment
Books and Literature
Get These Insights for Your Website
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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?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

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.

User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.2; +https://opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot; help@moz.com) 
# robots.txt
# This should block DotBot

User-agent: DotBot
Disallow: /

References