# AhrefsSiteAudit

## Quick answer

AhrefsSiteAudit is the crawler behind Ahrefs' Site Audit tool, which scans a website to find technical and on-page SEO issues for Ahrefs customers. It's a different bot from AhrefsBot, Ahrefs' general web crawler, and it only runs when an Ahrefs user points Site Audit at a site.

## What it does

AhrefsSiteAudit crawls a website the way Ahrefs' Site Audit product needs to, checking pages for technical SEO problems like broken links, missing tags, slow pages, and other on-page issues, then reporting the results back to the Ahrefs customer who ran the audit. It's a separate crawler from AhrefsBot, which Ahrefs uses more broadly for its backlink index and other data products, so blocking one doesn't affect the other. By default, AhrefsSiteAudit follows a site's robots.txt rules like any other crawler. Ahrefs does offer verified site owners a way to let their own Site Audit crawls disobey robots.txt, so the tool can reach pages that are normally disallowed, but that exception only applies to the site's own verified owner running their own audit.

## Facts

- Operator: Ahrefs
- Robots token: AhrefsSiteAudit
- User agent string(s): Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsSiteAudit/6.1; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/site-audit)
- Purpose: other
- Respects robots.txt: yes
- IP ranges: https://api.ahrefs.com/v3/public/crawler-ip-ranges

## Should you block it?

AhrefsSiteAudit isn't a search engine or an AI answer crawler, so blocking it doesn't change how a site ranks in search or shows up in AI answers. The real considerations are crawl load and who controls the data. Since Site Audit only runs when someone, often the site's own team, points it at a URL, the traffic is usually light and short-lived rather than a constant background crawl. The main reason to block it is if an unrelated party is running audits against a site without permission and it's adding unwanted request volume, or if a site owner simply doesn't want a third-party tool touching pages that aren't meant to be fetched automatically. If a site uses Ahrefs for its own SEO audits, blocking AhrefsSiteAudit would stop that workflow from working.

## How to block it

Add this to robots.txt to block AhrefsSiteAudit from crawling any page:

User-agent: AhrefsSiteAudit
Disallow: /

A verified site owner can also ask Ahrefs to let Site Audit disobey robots.txt on their own site, for auditing sections normally disallowed to crawlers.

## FAQ

### Is AhrefsSiteAudit the same as AhrefsBot?

No. AhrefsBot is Ahrefs' general web crawler for its backlink index and other data. AhrefsSiteAudit is a separate crawler used only by the Site Audit tool.

### Does AhrefsSiteAudit affect my search rankings?

No. It's an SEO auditing tool crawler, not a search engine crawler, so it has no direct effect on how a site ranks in search results.

### Can Ahrefs' Site Audit crawl pages I've disallowed in robots.txt?

Only if the site's verified owner specifically asks Ahrefs to let Site Audit disobey robots.txt on their own site; otherwise it follows the same rules as other crawlers.

## Sources

- AhrefsSiteAudit powers Ahrefs' Site Audit tool, which analyzes websites for technical and on-page SEO issues. Source: https://ahrefs.com/robot/
- AhrefsSiteAudit obeys robots.txt by default, but verified site owners can request it disobey robots.txt on their own site. Source: https://ahrefs.com/robot/