SemrushBot-BA
Semrush operates SemrushBot-BA, the crawler behind its Backlink Audit tool, which in Semrush's words helps discover and clean up potentially dangerous backlinks of your profile. Site owners block it with the robots.txt token SemrushBot-BA, which Semrush says it honors. Semrush documents no verification method, states it does not use consecutive IP blocks, and publishes no IP list.
What SemrushBot-BA does
Semrush documents SemrushBot-BA only as a robots.txt User-agent token on its bot page, paired with Disallow: / as the way to stop it. Semrush publishes no full user-agent string for this variant, so a site owner should expect the token SemrushBot-BA to appear in the user-agent header and match on that. Semrush ties the crawler to its Backlink Audit tool, which Semrush describes as helping users discover and clean up potentially dangerous backlinks of their profile. Semrush documents nothing else about how the crawler fetches pages.
Allowing it lets Semrush's Backlink Audit tool fetch a site's pages when checking links for its customers. Blocking it stops those fetches and has no documented effect on search engines. Semrush says the crawler respects robots.txt, so a group with User-agent: SemrushBot-BA and Disallow: / is the documented control. The Disallow: / example on the bot page is the only form of the rule Semrush shows, so a site owner who wants a partial block has no documented example to follow. Semrush does not say whether this variant honours crawl-delay.
Semrush's documentation gives no way to verify the crawler. The operator states that it does not use any consecutive IP blocks, publishes no IP list and gives no reverse-DNS hostname pattern, so a site owner has no documented method to confirm that a request carrying the SemrushBot-BA token came from Semrush. JavaScript execution is also undocumented. Site owners who want certainty are limited to the user-agent string and their own reading of the traffic pattern.
Operator note. Semrush documents this token only as a robots.txt User-agent that can be blocked with "Disallow: /" on its bot page. JavaScript execution, crawl-delay handling and IP addresses are not documented.
Controlling SemrushBot-BA with robots.txt
Use the token SemrushBot-BA in robots.txt. Semrush documents that SemrushBot-BA honors robots.txt directives.
User-agent: SemrushBot-BA
Disallow: /User-agent: SemrushBot-BA
Allow: /Verifying a request is really SemrushBot-BA
Anyone can put SemrushBot-BA in a User-Agent header. The operator does not document a verification method. Semrush states that "we do not use any consecutive IP blocks".
Common questions
Should I block SemrushBot-BA?
If you do not want Semrush's Backlink Audit tool fetching your pages, add a robots.txt group with User-agent: SemrushBot-BA and Disallow: /, which is the exact method Semrush documents. Blocking it has no documented effect on search engines; it only stops Semrush customers from auditing links through your site.
How do I verify SemrushBot-BA?
Semrush documents no verification method. It states that it does not use any consecutive IP blocks and publishes no IP list or reverse-DNS pattern. The user-agent token is the only documented identifier, and Semrush gives no way to confirm that a request carrying it came from Semrush.
Does SemrushBot-BA respect crawl-delay or run JavaScript?
The operator's documentation does not say. The bot page covers SemrushBot-BA only as a robots.txt token to disallow; crawl-delay handling, JavaScript execution and IP addresses are all undocumented for this variant.
Sources
Every fact on this page was checked against Semrush's own documentation, listed below, and re-checked by a second reviewer before publication. Reviewed September 2026.
Related crawlers
This registry documents how operators describe their own bots so site owners can identify and control them. It does not publish third-party IP lists or guess at undocumented behaviour. To see how your own site responds to automated visitors, the bot detection scanner reads a URL's live response and names the protection it finds.