SemrushBot-SWA

Operator

Semrush

robots.txt token

SemrushBot-SWA

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under SEO tools

What it does

Data collected is used for the SEO Writing Assistant tool to check if URL is accessible.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Checks URLs on your site for SEO Writing Assistant.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

Crawl frequency, per ai.robots.txt: Roughly once every 10 seconds.

How to block or allow SemrushBot-SWA

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: SemrushBot-SWA
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.

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.

How Vireo counts SemrushBot-SWA

When a request's user agent contains SemrushBot-SWA, Vireo keeps it 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 the bot's name.

Sources

• ai.robots.txt (MIT)