Ever surprise which search engine optimisation bots are essentially the most blocked? This could impression the standard of the info the instruments present.
Blocking these bots will principally impression the hyperlink index of the instruments. They gained’t be capable to crawl the pages, to allow them to’t test the place these pages are linking. It doesn’t matter for visitors estimates, key phrase rankings, high pages, and so on. These are constructed from completely different information sources.
For Ahrefs, it might additionally impression the interior hyperlinks we present and the web page historical past function that exhibits modifications to your pages over time, which you may want in some unspecified time in the future. Ahrefsbot additionally powers the index for our search engine, Yep.com, so blocking Ahrefsbot means you wouldn’t present in Yep’s search outcomes.
We checked out ~140 million web sites to see how usually search engine optimisation bots have been blocked. I wish to give an enormous due to our information scientist Xibeijia Guan for pulling this information.
Listed here are the highest 3 most blocked search engine optimisation bots:
- MJ12bot (Majestic). Blocked by 6.49% of all web sites.
- SemrushBot. Blocked by 6.34% of all web sites.
- AhrefsBot. Blocked by 6.31% of all web sites.
We regarded on the complete variety of web sites blocking the bots. There are a lot of methods to dam bots with robots.txt, and this accounts for all of them together with:
- Specific blocks, the place the bot is talked about and disallowed
- Normal blocks, the place all bots could also be blocked
- Any situations the place a directive allowed the bot, after blocking all bots
Caveats: this doesn’t embrace another block varieties equivalent to firewalls or IP blocks.
As I discussed earlier, essentially the most blocked bot is MJ12bot from Majestic. I think there are a pair causes for this.
- They’re a distributed crawler, that means you possibly can’t lookup or block them by IPs, which makes them much less trusted.
- They’ve been crawling the net for longer.
- They’ve a smaller consumer base than extra well-liked search engine optimisation instruments and due to this fact much less leverage to take away any blocks.
Listed here are essentially the most blocked search engine optimisation bots:

And the entire web sites blocking search engine optimisation bots:


Right here’s the information:
Bot Identify | Depend | Proportion % | Bot Operator |
---|---|---|---|
MJ12bot | 9081205 | 6.49 | Majestic |
SemrushBot | 8868486 | 6.34 | Semrush |
AhrefsBot | 8831316 | 6.31 | Ahrefs |
dotbot | 8569766 | 6.13 | Moz |
BLEXBot | 8374216 | 5.99 | search engine optimisation PowerSuite |
serpstatbot | 7878935 | 5.63 | Serpstat |
DataForSeoBot | 7872939 | 5.63 | DataForSEO |
SemrushBot-CT | 7855400 | 5.62 | Semrush |
Barkrowler | 7804425 | 5.58 | Babbar |
SemrushBot-BA | 7796785 | 5.57 | Semrush |
SemrushBot-SWA | 7789812 | 5.57 | Semrush |
SemrushBot-SI | 7789062 | 5.57 | Semrush |
SEOkicks | 7758904 | 5.55 | SEOkicks |
Screaming Frog search engine optimisation Spider | 7711108 | 5.51 | Screaming Frog |
linkdexbot | 7704425 | 5.51 | LinkDex |
DomainStatsBot | 7696944 | 5.5 | Domainstats |
ZoomBot | 7669495 | 5.48 | SEOZoom |
SiteCheckerBotCrawler | 7666545 | 5.48 | Sitechecker |
Cocolyzebot | 7666233 | 5.48 | Cocolyze |
SeobilityBot | 7664228 | 5.48 | Seobility |
SenutoBot | 7655145 | 5.47 | Senuto |
hypestat | 7648671 | 5.47 | HypeStat |
online-webceo-bot | 7648444 | 5.47 | WebCEO |
BrightEdge Crawler | 7648139 | 5.47 | BrightEdge |
SEOlizer | 7648112 | 5.47 | SEOLizer |
It will get a bit of extra difficult to research. For the above, we regarded on the major robots.txt file for an internet site, however each subdomain can have their very own set of directions. If we take a look at the ~461M robots.txt in complete, then essentially the most blocked search engine optimisation bot is SemrushBot at 5.76%. Listed here are the highest 5:
- SemrushBot: 5.76%
- Dotbot (Moz): 5.34%
- MJ12bot (Majestic): 4.96%
- BLEXBot: 4.88%
- Ahrefsbot: 4.67%
For this measure, we’re trying solely at circumstances the place a specific bot is disallowed. It doesn’t embrace any total disallow statements or circumstances the place solely sure bots could also be allowed. In these circumstances, web site homeowners went out of their strategy to particularly block sure bots.
Majestic’s bot is essentially the most focused, adopted by Moz’s bot.
Listed here are essentially the most blocked search engine optimisation bots by express mentions:


Listed here are the variety of web sites explicitly blocking search engine optimisation bots:


Right here’s the information:
Bot Identify | Depend | Proportion % | Bot Operator |
---|---|---|---|
MJ12bot | 2000372 | 1.43 | Majestic |
dotbot | 1402305 | 1 | Moz |
AhrefsBot | 1350771 | 0.97 | Ahrefs |
SemrushBot | 1285857 | 0.92 | Semrush |
BLEXBot | 861184 | 0.62 | search engine optimisation PowerSuite |
serpstatbot | 354683 | 0.25 | Serpstat |
DataForSeoBot | 284694 | 0.2 | DataForSEO |
Barkrowler | 276332 | 0.2 | Babbar |
SEOkicks | 219961 | 0.16 | SEOkicks |
SemrushBot-CT | 211895 | 0.15 | Semrush |
linkdexbot | 166405 | 0.12 | Linkdex |
DomainStatsBot | 157053 | 0.11 | Domainstats |
SemrushBot-BA | 154349 | 0.11 | Semrush |
SemrushBot-SI | 147999 | 0.11 | Semrush |
SemrushBot-SWA | 146261 | 0.1 | Semrush |
ZoomBot | 125310 | 0.09 | SEOZoom |
SiteCheckerBotCrawler | 122574 | 0.09 | Sitechecker |
Cocolyzebot | 121737 | 0.09 | Cocolyze |
SeobilityBot | 117558 | 0.08 | Seobility |
Screaming Frog search engine optimisation Spider | 87673 | 0.06 | Screaming Frog |
SenutoBot | 54978 | 0.04 | Senuto |
hypestat | 861 | 0 | HypeStat |
SenutoBot | 54978 | 0.04 | Senuto |
hypestat | 861 | 0 | HypeStat |
online-webceo-bot | 659 | 0 | WebCEO |
BrightEdge Crawler | 289 | 0 | BrightEdge |
SEOlizer | 253 | 0 | SEOLizer |
We regarded on the high 1M websites by DR, which aligns to websites with a DR >45. Semrush is essentially the most blocked adopted by Majestic and Moz.

Right here’s the way it breaks down for every particular person bot in several classes of internet sites. The highest 3 are:
- Autos_and_Vehicles: 39%
- Books_and_Literature: 27%
- Real_Estate: 17%


Going by the bot requests in Cloudflare Radar, Ahrefs is by far the quickest crawler within the search engine optimisation area. ~4.6x sooner than Moz and ~6.7x sooner than Semrush.

