What is Rogerbot? Moz's SEO crawler
Rogerbot is the crawler Moz uses for Moz Pro Campaign site audits and On-Demand Crawl.
24 of the 379 major websites we measure block Rogerbot in robots.txt (6%). 9 of those sites name it directly in their robots.txt; the rest are covered by a wildcard rule.
Key facts
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Operator | Moz |
| Used for | Moz Pro site audits |
| Type | SEO tool. Collects web data for an SEO tool. Listed here because people look it up beside AI crawlers. It isn't counted in the AI crawler figures. |
| robots.txt token | Rogerbot |
| Operator's documentation | Read it here |
What blocking Rogerbot does
Moz says Rogerbot is built to obey robots.txt. It is a different crawler from Dotbot, which powers Moz's link index.
How to allow or block Rogerbot
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. It is a stated preference that well-behaved crawlers read, not an enforcement mechanism.
User-agent: Rogerbot Disallow: /
User-agent: Rogerbot Allow: /
Rogerbot user agent string
Moz's page doesn't list a full string, so look for Rogerbot in the user agent field of your logs.
How to verify a request is really Rogerbot
Anyone can put a crawler's name in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Moz says Rogerbot has no static IP address or range, because it uses thousands of dynamic addresses that change with each crawl.
How to whitelist Rogerbot in a firewall or CDN
robots.txt only states a preference. A firewall, CDN or bot protection service can still refuse the request, and the crawler then gets an error even though robots.txt allows it.
- Check that no group in your robots.txt blocks it, using the rule above.
- Add an allow rule in your firewall or CDN that matches the name in the user agent. Keep the rule narrow, because anyone can copy a name.
- Check your server logs for a 200 response from Rogerbot afterwards.
On Cloudflare, also check AI Crawler and Agent access policies, which can block search, agent and training traffic across a site.
Why Rogerbot gets a 403 or 405 error
A 403 means the server refused the request, which usually points to a firewall or bot rule. A 405 means the server refused the request's method, so check any rule that only permits certain methods. A crawler that obeys robots.txt won't request a page it is told to avoid, so an error in your logs points to your server's configuration. To stop it deliberately at the server, this nginx rule returns a 403:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Rogerbot") {
return 403;
}Who blocks Rogerbot, by sector
| Sector | Sites measured | Blocking | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social and media platforms | 27 | 7 | 26% |
| News publishers | 44 | 6 | 14% |
| Finance and business media | 29 | 3 | 10% |
| Technology media | 23 | 2 | 9% |
| Reference and research | 25 | 2 | 8% |
| Government and institutions | 17 | 1 | 6% |
| E-commerce and retail | 19 | 1 | 5% |
| Hosting and infrastructure | 22 | 1 | 5% |
| SEO and marketing tools | 25 | 1 | 4% |
| AI companies | 26 | 0 | 0% |
| Developer references | 34 | 0 | 0% |
| Health publishers | 16 | 0 | 0% |
| SaaS platforms | 53 | 0 | 0% |
| Travel | 19 | 0 | 0% |
Sites blocking Rogerbot
academia.edu, barrons.com, bloomberg.com, disneyplus.com, flickr.com, france24.com, gandi.net, hackernoon.com, hulu.com, imdb.com, instacart.com, marketwatch.com, netflix.com, pinterest.com, reddit.com, reuters.com, sciencedirect.com, serpstat.com, spiegel.de, theregister.com, thetimes.co.uk, who.int, wise.com, wsj.com.
Sites that allow Rogerbot by name
Other Moz crawlers
Dotbot (SEO link index).
See all 30 AI crawlers, the rule change log or the full study. Being reachable is only the first step: how AI search engines choose what to cite covers the rest.
Cite this data
You are welcome to quote or republish these figures. Please credit IndexHalo with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0). All our datasets are on the data page.
IndexHalo. "Rogerbot block rate across major websites." Measured 3 November 2026. https://www.indexhalo.com/ai-crawlers/rogerbot/
<a href="https://www.indexhalo.com/ai-crawlers/rogerbot/">Rogerbot block rate across major websites, IndexHalo</a>