AhrefsBot

What is AhrefsBot?

AhrefsBot is the web crawler owned and operated by SEO specialists Ahrefs. The tool has become an important component of the services offered by Ahrefs, which help to provide essential insights into backlink and keyword data.

What does AhrefsBot do? The job of this tool is to continuously crawl the World Wide Web and follow links from page to page, helping to build an enormous index of web pages and backlinks that power Ahrefs reports.

Whenever you look up a site’s backlink profile in Ahrefs, you’re actually querying data that’s been discovered and compiled by AhrefsBot, with the tool scouring the web in a similar way to Googlebot.

Why is AhrefsBot Important?

Understanding how AhrefsBot works is important because it’s one of the most active non-search-engine crawlers on the internet. After the bots created and distributed by Google and Bing, AhrefsBot is among the helpful crawlers that are most likely to be regularly landing on your website.

For the most part, being visited by AhrefsBot is a good thing, because it means that your backlinks are getting discovered and reflected in the tools that you and your competitors use to measure the performance of your link building efforts. Generally speaking, if you’re looking to make sure your links show up in Ahrefs reports quickly, you’ll want AhrefsBot crawling your website.

Blocking AhrefsBot

Some website owners decide against allowing AhrefsBot. This is usually because they want to reduce server load on a resource-constrained site, or they’re looking to prevent rivals from analysing their backlink profile.

However, this measure comes at a cost. If you block AhrefsBot, you may save on some crawl activity and improve your privacy to a small extent, but you’ll miss out on visibility into your own data within Ahrefs, and you won’t be able to stop the bot from identifying links to you that exist on other sites either way.

For most marketers, the visibility that AhrefsBot provides is worth more than some of the privacy concerns that are expressed by others, so most businesses opt to allow the crawler.

Managing AhrefsBot

There are ways to manage the behaviour of AhrefsBot, and because it respects robots.txt files, there are plenty of ways to control or limit the extent of its crawling on your site. You can even set up a crawl delay if your server load is a concern.

Because Ahrefs publishes the bot’s user-agent and guidance for doing this, it’s easy to keep it in check. AhrefsBot is also well-behaved enough to honour its directives, ensuring that you have proper control over what it can and cannot do.

As a result, most people can benefit from AhrefsBot as a user-friendly crawler that won’t cause damage to your website speed or privacy, by and large.

Unless you have a specific reason to limit its access, letting it get on with its work in the background ensures that your link data stays current.

Additionally, if you’re an Ahrefs user yourself, the engine can work wonders in supporting the reports that you’ll depend on for brand insights.