AI crawlers · SEO and research crawlers
DotBot
DotBot is the tool or developer fetch run by Moz: Moz link index. Its operator publishes no IP ranges or DNS names for it, so a request carrying this name cannot be verified. Treat the name in a log line as a claim.
| User-agent token | DotBot |
| Operator | Moz |
| What it does | Moz link index |
| Kind | tool or developer fetch |
| Can a request be verified? | No — user agent string only |
| In a CrawlCheck scan | Read from robots.txt; reported, never scored |
Allow or block it in robots.txt
User-agent: DotBot Disallow: /
User-agent: DotBot Allow: /
Add a group that names it: "User-agent: DotBot" followed by "Disallow: /". A crawler follows only the most specific group that names it, so once a group names DotBot, rules under "User-agent: *" no longer apply to it; repeat in that group any Disallow lines you still want.
What blocking it changes
No. It is a third-party tool's crawler. Blocking it changes what that tool knows about your site, not anyone's AI answers.
Other agents from Moz
rogerbot— Moz site crawler
See what DotBot and every other named agent receive from your own site: run a free scan. The full catalogue is on AI crawlers and as JSON at /ai-crawlers.json.