What is AhrefsBot?

How often is AhrefsBot impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be AhrefsBot failed verification.

Measured between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be AhrefsBot? Check its IP address.

Should you block AhrefsBot?

Allow it if

you or your partners use this tool's backlink or audit data, or the crawl load is not a concern.

Block it if

the crawl load is noticeable and you have no use for the tool's data. Blocking it does not affect search rankings.

What blocking changes

Ahrefs and Yep stop updating their data about your pages. Use Crawl-delay if load is the only issue.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Ahrefs says AhrefsBot obeys robots.txt and Crawl-delay.

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be AhrefsBot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.