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⏱ 4 minutes Performance AI Bots Access

Block SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, and competitor scrapers

These bots crawl your site continuously to feed your competitors' tools — without ever sending you a single visitor. Here's how to cut them off cleanly.

TL;DR
  1. Open Livada SEO → AI Bots Access.
  2. Section SEO Scrapers: SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, MJ12bot, and DotBot are blocked by default.
  3. Check that the toggles are set to Block, then save.
  4. Run the live diagnostic to confirm.

Why block these bots

SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, MJ12bot, and DotBot are neither search engines nor citation AIs. They're bots for commercial SEO tools: they crawl your site to build backlink and keyword databases that get resold to your competitors.

In exchange, they bring you no visitors at all. On a site with a high page count, they can account for a significant share of the server load. Cutting them off means bandwidth and CPU returned to your real visitors — with zero impact on your Google rankings or your AI visibility.

✓ Blocking an SEO scraper takes nothing away from your SEO. Google, Bing, and citation AIs (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) are different bots, managed in other sections.
1

Open "AI Bots Access"

In the WordPress menu: Livada SEO → AI Bots Access. The page groups all bots into clear sections, including one dedicated to SEO Scrapers.

You'll find, among others: SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, MJ12bot (Majestic), and DotBot (Moz).

2

Check that they're blocked

Good news: by default, Livada SEO already blocks the main SEO scrapers. Just check that the toggles in the section are set to Block, then save.

In practice, the plugin adds an explicit rule for each scraper in your robots.txt (and, depending on your setup, an application-level block). No manual file editing required.
3

Confirm with the live diagnostic

At the top of the page, run the live diagnostic. The plugin tests each bot with its real user-agent and displays the status returned by your site.

SEO Scrapers → 403 = properly blocked ✓
AI Citation Bots → 200 = still visible ✓

When NOT to block them

Just one case: if you yourself use Semrush or Ahrefs to audit your own site (technical audit, rank tracking). In that case, temporarily allow the bot in question for the duration of the audit, then block it again. For the vast majority of showcase and e-commerce sites, permanent blocking is the right choice.

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