rogerbot — Moz's site-audit crawler
rogerbot is the crawler operated by Moz to power Moz Pro Campaigns, site crawl, and link-related features. It is an SEO tool crawler, not a search engine, so its visits do not affect search rankings. Moz documents the rogerbot token and publishes guidance for operators who want to identify or restrict it in robots.txt.
What this means
rogerbot is the crawler Moz uses for Moz Pro Campaigns and its site-crawl/audit features. When a Moz subscriber adds your site to a Campaign, rogerbot fetches pages to build crawl, on-page, and link reports. It is a third-party SEO tool crawler — its visits do not influence how search engines rank you.
Because anyone can point a Moz Campaign at any public site, you may see rogerbot even if you do not subscribe to Moz. That is expected: it means an external party is auditing or monitoring your pages.
How rogerbot identifies itself
rogerbot uses the robots.txt user-agent token rogerbot. Its user-agent string contains the rogerbot token together with a self-identifying URL pointing at Moz's crawler documentation. Match on the stable token rather than a full version string.
As with any crawler, the user agent is a claim that can be copied. For requests where authenticity matters, corroborate against Moz's documented crawler guidance rather than trusting the string alone.
- robots.txt token: rogerbot
- User agent contains the rogerbot token plus a Moz URL
- An SEO tool crawler, not a search-engine indexer
robots.txt and crawl load
rogerbot honours robots.txt. To disallow it site-wide:
User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /
Moz also documents crawl-delay handling for rogerbot, so you can ask it to slow down rather than block it entirely if the only issue is load. robots.txt is a request honoured by compliant crawlers, not an access-control boundary.
How it appears in analytics and logs
A request carrying the rogerbot token is Moz's audit crawler fetching a URL on behalf of a Moz Pro subscriber — a bot event, not a human visit. Sustained rogerbot activity usually means someone is running a site audit or tracking your site; it is crawl coverage, not audience.
Diagnostic use case
Identify rogerbot activity when a Moz Pro Campaign audits your site, decide whether to allow it, and throttle or block it if its crawl rate adds noticeable load.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies rogerbot server-side as an SEO crawler and surfaces its activity on the bot-intelligence surface, separate from human analytics, so you can see which Moz audits touched your site without parsing raw server logs.
Common mistakes
- Counting rogerbot audit hits as human sessions, inflating page-view metrics.
- Assuming rogerbot affects search rankings — it is an SEO tool crawler, not an indexer.
- Blocking rogerbot when only a slower crawl rate (crawl-delay) was needed.
Privacy and accuracy notes
rogerbot detection uses only the request user-agent. No human identity is involved — a crawler is not a person. WebmasterID records the crawl as a bot event, separate from human analytics, and never attaches it to a visitor profile.
Frequently asked questions
- Does rogerbot affect my Google rankings?
- No. rogerbot powers Moz's own audit and reporting tools. It does not feed a search index, so its visits do not change how Google or Bing rank your pages.
Related pages
- AhrefsBot — Ahrefs SEO crawler
AhrefsBot is the crawler operated by Ahrefs to build its SEO and backlink index. It is a third-party crawler, not a search engine, so it does not affect Google or Bing rankings directly. It uses the AhrefsBot robots.txt token and is documented as respecting robots.txt and crawl-delay.
- Managing third-party SEO crawler load
Third-party SEO crawlers such as AhrefsBot and SemrushBot can generate significant request volume without contributing to search visibility. You can manage their load by targeting their tokens in robots.txt, using crawl-delay where the crawler supports it, and blocking those that bring no value to you.
- Search crawlers vs SEO crawlers
Search-engine crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot build the indexes that determine search visibility. Third-party SEO crawlers like AhrefsBot and SemrushBot feed analysis tools and do not affect rankings directly. Distinguishing them matters for crawl-budget reasoning and for deciding what to allow or limit.
- Bot intelligence
Deterministic categorisation of crawlers, search bots, and SEO tools.
Sources and verification notes
- Moz — rogerbot crawler helpDocuments the rogerbot token and robots.txt / crawl-delay handling.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.