SemrushBot

Operator

Semrush

Type

Crawler

Official page

semrush.com

robots.txt token

SemrushBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Semrush.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under SEO tools

What it does

Discovers and collects web data for Semrush's SEO tools, mainly its backlink index.

SemrushBot is the search bot software that Semrush sends out to discover and collect new and updated web data.

Semrush

User agent

Requests from SemrushBot carry user agents like these:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/0.97; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot-SWA/0.1; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)

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

SemrushBot

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 SemrushBot

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
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.

To block SemrushBot from crawling your site for a webgraph of links: User-agent: SemrushBot Disallow: /

Semrush

To stop SemrushBot from crawling your site, add the following rules to your robots.txt file

Semrush

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

Semrush runs several tokens (SiteAuditBot, SemrushBot-BA, SemrushBot-SI, SemrushBot-SWA, SplitSignalBot, SemrushBot-OCOB, SemrushBot-FT, RyteBot, SemrushBot-ESI), each blocked separately. It has no published IP list.

Do not try to block SemrushBot via IP as we do not use any consecutive IP blocks.

Semrush

How Vireo counts SemrushBot

Vireo keeps requests from SemrushBot 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 SemrushBot's user agents.

Sources

• Semrush: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)