Moz has two crawlers, not one — and blocking them does two different things

Which one is in your logs

Moz describes the split plainly in its own documentation:

• Dotbot "collects data for our Link index which is available through Link Explorer and our Links API." It crawls the web at large.
• Rogerbot "crawls your site for Moz Pro Site Crawl; if you have a Moz Pro Campaign setup we'll crawl your site weekly." It runs the Campaign Site Crawl and On-Demand Crawl.

The practical difference: Dotbot arrives whether or not anyone is paying Moz to look at you. Rogerbot arrives because someone added your domain to a campaign.

The user-agent is the only reliable way to tell them apart. Moz states it does not publish an IP range for Rogerbot: "we do not have an IP range for Rogerbot as we do not use a static IP address or range of IP addresses. The best option available is to identify our crawler by User-agent: rogerbot."

If you're building firewall rules around a list of "Moz IP ranges" you found somewhere, there isn't one to build them from.

Rogerbot's current agent string is rogerbot/1.2.

What blocking each one actually costs you

Blocking Dotbot. Moz's index stops seeing your pages. The links on your site stop being collected, and your pages stop being part of what Link Explorer knows.

What Moz does not say is what this does to your own Domain Authority, and it's worth being precise about why the obvious assumption is probably wrong: the links pointing to you are discovered by crawling the sites that link to you, not by crawling yours. Blocking Dotbot on your own domain does not remove other people's links to you from Moz's index.

If you need certainty on this, it's a question for Moz rather than something to infer — including from this page.

Blocking Rogerbot. The site audit stops working. If it's your own campaign, you've turned off your own crawl report. If it's an agency or a client tracking your site, theirs breaks and you'll hear about it.

Rogerbot obeys robots.txt, so this is a decision you control rather than something you have to fight.

Neither bot is the one behind your Performance Metrics. Moz states that data is gathered by Google Lighthouse's crawler. If Performance Metrics reports are erroring out, the user-agent to check is Chrome-Lighthouse — blocking that is a separate mistake from blocking either Moz crawler, and it's an easy one to make while tidying up a robots.txt file.

How to actually write the rules

Both crawlers read robots.txt, and each is a separate record.

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

Two rules from Moz's own documentation that catch people out:

*Put specific user-agent records above `User-agent: `.* Moz's guidance is explicit: "Bots look for records that match their user-agent. If they don't find a record, they will use the User-agent: record which applies to all bots. To help them find their user-agent make sure this is above User-agent: ."*

You cannot disallow a subdomain by naming it. Moz states: "you cannot have the full domain in a disallow directive. This is parsed as a full Disallow: /". Writing Disallow: sub.example.com does not block a subdomain — it blocks everything. A subdomain needs its own robots.txt, served from that subdomain.

If you want to allow Rogerbot but little else, order matters for the same reason: the specific record has to come before the wildcard.

When each answer is right

Allow both. You're using Moz Pro yourself, or you want your site represented normally in Moz's link data. This is the default and it's the right default for most sites.

Allow Dotbot, block Rogerbot. Uncommon, but it fits a site that doesn't want repeated deep audit crawls from third parties while staying in the link index.

Block Dotbot, allow Rogerbot. You run your own campaign and want your audit, but you'd rather not be in a third-party link index. ⚠️ Note this doesn't remove existing inbound links others point at you.

Block both. Your server is genuinely struggling and you've decided Moz's data isn't worth the requests. Reasonable — but if anyone in your organisation is paying for Moz Pro, tell them first, because their crawl report will go quiet without an obvious cause.

What we see across the tools we catalogue

Of the SEO tools in our catalogue, Moz is one of the few that runs and documents two separately named crawlers with different jobs. Most tools of this type either run one crawler or don't name them individually in their public documentation.

That matters for anyone reading a server log, because generic advice about "blocking SEO crawlers" assumes one bot per vendor. Here, one blanket rule makes a decision you probably didn't intend to make about the other one.

Compare Moz vs Semrush.

Common questions

Is Dotbot the same as Rogerbot? No. Moz's own documentation says so directly: Dotbot is the index crawler, Rogerbot is the site-audit crawler for Moz Pro Campaigns.

How often does Rogerbot crawl? If you have a Moz Pro Campaign set up, Moz states it crawls weekly.

Does Rogerbot respect crawl-delay? Moz publishes guidance on using a crawl delay to slow Rogerbot down, so it can be throttled rather than blocked outright if request volume is the real problem.

How long until a new link shows up in Moz's index? Moz states newly discovered links can populate into the index in about three days, and that it may take longer depending on how crawlable the referring page is.

I blocked a Moz crawler and my Performance Metrics broke. Why? That report isn't gathered by either Moz crawler. Moz states it comes from Google Lighthouse's crawler, so check whether Chrome-Lighthouse is being blocked.

Can I verify a Moz crawler by IP? Not for Rogerbot. Moz states there is no static IP or IP range, and that the user-agent is the way to identify it.