AhrefsBot
Ahrefs · Other bots · User agent + IP range
About this crawler
Crawls for Ahrefs' backlink index and SEO tools.
Usually means: A product is checking the page for a specific job: an ad review, a link preview, a feed or an SEO index.
User agent
AhrefsBot
MetricRaven matches this token anywhere in the request's user agent, ignoring case. Operators add version numbers and browser text around it, for example "AhrefsBot/1.0".
IP verification
Verified when the user agent and the IP range both match
1User agent
The request's user agent contains
AhrefsBot.2Request IP
Your server-side tracker sends the IP that made the request.
3Range check
The IP is compared with the ranges Ahrefs publishes, refreshed twice a day.
Range sources
AhrefsBot IP ranges
Control it in robots.txt
User-agent: AhrefsBot Disallow: /private/
Well-behaved crawlers re-read robots.txt within a day or so.
Questions
- What is AhrefsBot?
- Crawls for Ahrefs' backlink index and SEO tools. MetricRaven groups it under Other bots: ad checks, link previews, feed readers, SEO tools and other bots.
- How do I verify that a request really comes from AhrefsBot?
- Check both the user agent and the IP. Requests from AhrefsBot contain "AhrefsBot" in the user agent and come from the IP ranges Ahrefs publishes (https://api.ahrefs.com/v3/public/crawler-ip-ranges). A request with the name but another IP is likely spoofed.
- How do I block or allow AhrefsBot?
- Add a robots.txt group for "AhrefsBot" with the paths to allow or disallow. Fetchers that act for a user may ignore robots.txt; block those at your server or firewall instead.
- How can I see when AhrefsBot visits my website?
- Most crawlers never run JavaScript, so browser analytics miss them. MetricRaven's @metricraven/ai-crawl package reports crawler requests from your server, verifies their IPs against published ranges, and shows which pages each crawler reads.
See when AI assistants and crawlers read your site
Add one line to your server and MetricRaven shows which assistants, search engines and training crawlers request your pages, which ones are IP-verified, and the URLs they expected to find, including 404s.