Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate XXIX0x8D67A80DUNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Crawlers›Family SEO Crawlers›Species DotBot
Specimen file · SEO Swamp

DotBot

Punctum mozi

What is DotBot?

Moz's crawler for its link index. It is operated by Moz and identifies itself as DotBot.

Temperament: mild. Comes once a week. Stays exactly long enough.

Operator
Moz
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
Not yet
Last seen
Not yet
Visits today
0
This week
0
All time
0
Caught in the trap
Never
How to block DotBot ↓
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.2; +https://opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot; help@moz.com)

Moz does not publish a way to verify DotBot's traffic. Treat its user agent as a claim, not proof: anyone can send it. Read Moz's documentation.

§ II.

How to block DotBot

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from DotBot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block DotBot from the whole site
User-agent: DotBot
Disallow: /

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: DotBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h
robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

The networks DotBot's visits came from:

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Questions site owners ask

Does DotBot respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking DotBot hurt my search rankings?

No. SEO crawlers build tools for marketers. Blocking them hides your links from those tools, not from search engines.

How often does DotBot visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

Also in SEO Swamp