AhrefsBot

Chainus slitherus

Made of links. Counts yours as it slithers past.*

robots.txtFOLLOWED
AlignmentInsufficient data: Needs 200 requests and 5 sessions in 30 days.

What it did here†

VerifiedPassed Passport Control.
UnverifiedSaid they were AhrefsBot and could not be checked, or have not been answered yet. Shown for the species, and not put down to Ahrefs.
Failed Passport ControlFiled under Impostor and not on this page at all.

Its record with each rule

Trailing 30 days	Verified	Unverified
Sessions	1	0
Requests	3	0
Sessions that asked for anything besides robots.txt	1	0
read robots.txt first	1	0
had read it in the 24 hours before	0	0
read it only afterwards	0	0
did not read it	0	0
Sessions that asked for a disallowed path	0	0
Sessions that entered the Pitfall	0	0
having read robots.txt	0	0
Pages taken in the Pitfall and the Climb	0	0
Requests turned back at the vault, with a 403	0	0
Highest Climb level reached	Has not climbed	Has not climbed
Private Beach visits while on the guest list	0	0
Turnstile waits kept	0	0
Turnstile waits broken	0	0
Sessions served a page that carries the nofollow link	1	0
followed it	0	0
Requests over the rate limit	0	0
sessions that went over it	0	0

What it asks for‡

Part of the site	Verified requests	Unverified requests
The island, on the home page	1	0
robots.txt, on the buoy	1	0
The sitemap	1	0

Sessions that used this name, by day§

today, log missed 5 1 passed

passed: the operator’s own1

failed: filed under the Impostor0

log not whole

Sessions that used this name on each of the last 30 days, UTC
Day	Passed Passport Control	Requests by the sessions counted
13 Sep	0	0
14 Sep	0	0
15 Sep	0	0
16 Sep	0	0
17 Sep	0	0
18 Sep	0	0
19 Sep	0	0
20 Sep	0	0
21 Sep	0	0
22 Sep	0	0
23 Sep	0	0
24 Sep	0	0
25 Sep	0	0
26 Sep	0	0
27 Sep	0	0
28 Sep	0	0
29 Sep	0	0
30 Sep	0	0
1 Oct	0	0
2 Oct	0	0
3 Oct	0	0
4 Oct	0	0
5 Oct	0	0
6 Oct	0	0
7 Oct	0	0
8 Oct, log missed 13	0	0
9 Oct, log missed 40	0	0
10 Oct, log missed 26	0	0
11 Oct, log missed 15	0	0
12 Oct, so far, log missed 5	1	3

Favourite hours, UTC

20:00 1 verified, 0 unverified

VerifiedUnverified

Landings in each hour of the UTC day, over the last 30 days
Hour	Verified	Total
00:00	0	0
01:00	0	0
02:00	0	0
03:00	0	0
04:00	0	0
05:00	0	0
06:00	0	0
07:00	0	0
08:00	0	0
09:00	0	0
10:00	0	0
11:00	0	0
12:00	0	0
13:00	0	0
14:00	0	0
15:00	0	0
16:00	0	0
17:00	0	0
18:00	0	0
19:00	0	0
20:00	1	1
21:00	0	0
22:00	0	0
23:00	0	0

Where it comes from‡

Verified sessions, the busiest 1
Network owner	Country	Sessions	Requests
OVH SAS	Canada	1	3

What it has cost this site†

	Today	Last 7 days	All time
Requests	3	3	3
Bytes served	42.3 KB	42.3 KB	42.3 KB

Who it is¶

Ahrefs

Runs AhrefsBot

The Surveyors · SEO and web measurement · Order MensoresAutonomous bot

AhrefsBot maps the links between sites for Ahrefs, an SEO toolset.

How Ahrefs says to check it

Crawls from published IP ranges. The reverse DNS suffix of its addresses is always ahrefs.com or ahrefs.net. The page asks for the suffix only: the forward lookup is this site being careful. The operator’s documentation

Passport Control

A session that says it is AhrefsBot is checked in the way Ahrefs documents. Passing any one check is enough.

Address list A match against the list of addresses the operator publishes. The published list.
Reverse DNS Forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the address has a reverse DNS name under the operator’s domain, and that name resolves back to the same address. Names must end in ahrefs.com or ahrefs.net.

Reference

The user agent it sends, and how to address it in robots.txt.

User agent, and how a request is filed under this species

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)

A string it is known to send. Parts that vary are shown as an ellipsis.

A request is filed under this species when its user-agent string contains the product name AhrefsBot as a whole word, in any mix of capitals. Where a string holds more than one product name, the longest wins, and a named bot wins over a library it is built on.

How to address this bot in robots.txt

The line that addresses it

User-agent: AhrefsBot

An example group. The path is a placeholder.

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /a-path/
Allow: /a-path/one-page

This is reference, not advice. Systema Machinae is not a bot-blocking product.

This site’s own robots.txt names it, in the group that keeps the guest list off the Private Beach.

Notes

*The line under the name is a joke about the drawing. It plays on the name and says nothing about how the bot behaves.
†Counted from the request log for today and the 29 days before it, by UTC date. These are counts, not a verdict: a session is judged on what it did inside the 30 days. A landing is the first request of a session. Bytes are the size of the response body, counted whatever the score.
‡Parts of the site come from a fixed list, so a path is never shown. Networks are shown by owner and country only, so an address is never shown.
§The log missed about 99 requests on 5 of the last 30 days, the most on 9 October (40): the front door took them in and the server did not answer.
¶What it is and who runs it, under Who it is, is a claim: the operator’s own account where it has published one, and a third party’s where it has not. This site has not tested it.