Should I block SEMrush in my robots.txt?

If you're not using SEMrush, and you want to preserve bandwidth or prevent SEMrush from indexing backlinks then you can block their bot.

Block SEMrush bots entirely

This example is pretty straight forward, it just blocks SEMrush's bots entirely:

User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /

Tell SemrushBot to go easy on your site

Alternatively, you could tell SemrushBot to crawl your site slowly if they're taking up too much of your site's resources. Here's how to tell them to crawl one URL per minute:

User-agent: SemrushBot
Crawl-delay: 60

Block SEMrush' backlink audit tool, but allow other tools

And say you only want to block their backlink audit tool, but allow their other tools to access the site you can put this in your robots.txt:

User-agent: SemrushBot-BA
Disallow: /

How long does it take before SEMrush obeys my robots.txt?

According to SEMrush, it can take them up to one hour or 100 requests to re-check your robots.txt file and process its contents.

Further reading

If you want to read more about this topic, check out our robots.txt guide and the SEMrushbot documentation .