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dotbot

seo dotbot

Moz DotBot web crawler for SEO analysis

About this crawler

dotbot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern dotbot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as seo. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block dotbot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

2.3%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: dotbot
2026-05-012026-06-043.4%

Technical details

Name
dotbot
Pattern
dotbot
Tags
seo
Added
2011/04/27
rDNS suffixes
.dotbot.com, .moz.com, .rogerbot.com
Instances
3 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely dotbot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

Sample User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, [email protected])
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.2; +https://opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot; [email protected])
dotbot

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow dotbot:

User-agent: dotbot Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} dotbot [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "dotbot") { return 403; }
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