DotBot

Operator

Moz

Type

Crawler

Official page

moz.com

robots.txt token

dotbot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Moz.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under SEO tools

What it does

Moz's crawler for the Moz Link Index used by Link Explorer, the Moz API and Moz Pro.

Dotbot is Moz's web crawler, it gathers web data for the Moz Link Index.

Moz

User agent

Requests from DotBot carry a user agent like this:

dotbot

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

DotBot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow DotBot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

User-agent: dotbot Disallow: /

Moz

we always respect the standard Robots Exclusion Protocol (aka robots.txt).

Moz

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

It reads robots.txt only the first time it meets a site in a new index crawl, so changes can take a while to apply.

Dotbot only looks at your robots.txt file the first time it encounters that site during a new index crawl.

Moz

How Vireo counts DotBot

Vireo keeps requests from DotBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under SEO tools, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over DotBot's user agents.

Sources

• Moz: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• DotBot information page (opensiteexplorer.org)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)