SEO tools · Moz

DotBot

Moz’s crawler for its link index. Blocking it does not affect search engines.

Operator: Moz
Purpose: Backlink & SEO index. Crawlers behind backlink and SEO tools. Many sites block them to save bandwidth; it has no effect on search.
robots.txt token: DotBot
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.2; +https://opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot; help@moz.com)
Documentation: moz.com/help/moz-procedures/crawlers/dotbot

Block DotBot

Add a group naming it to /robots.txt. Compliant crawlers stop before requesting any page. A firewall rule on the user agent is the only way to enforce it against crawlers that ignore robots.txt.

User-agent: DotBot
Disallow: /

Allow DotBot when everything else is blocked

A group naming the bot wins over User-agent: *, so an explicit allow lets it in while your catch-all rules stay in place.

User-agent: DotBot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Does DotBot reach your site?

The checker applies your robots.txt the way DotBot does, then requests your page with the user agent above, alongside 29 other bots.

Other seo tools: AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, MJ12bot.

Build a complete file with the robots.txt generator.