Everything You Want to Know about Moz dotbot
Dotbot is Moz's web crawler that gathers data for Moz's Link Index, powering Link Explorer and the Moz Links API. It's distinct from Rogerbot, Moz's separate Campaign site-audit crawler.
Last verified August 15, 2026 against Moz's published crawler docs
Why it's crawling your site
Dotbot crawls your site (and pages linking to it) to build Moz's link index; it respects robots.txt, checked once per site at the start of a new index crawl.
How Moz dotbot views your website
Moz dotbot fetches raw page HTML (full page html) — it does not execute JavaScript. Content that only appears after client-side rendering is invisible to it.
Paste a URL for the rendered-vs-crawled diff, blocked resources, and the sections that never reach the bot.
How to block Moz dotbot
Add the rule below to your site's robots.txt. Most crawlers, including Moz dotbot, check for changes within 24 hours.
User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /Need the full walkthrough?
Partial blocks, per-directory rules, Cloudflare and server-level options, verification.