AHXBot

AHXBot is the crawler behind AHX SEO Labs site audits. It identifies itself with this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AHXBot/1.0; +https://seo.ahxlabs.com/bot)

When it visits

Only when a person who manages the site in Google Search Console starts an audit of it. We check that access with Google before every scan. AHXBot does not crawl the web on its own.

How it behaves

• It follows robots.txt.
• It fetches pages slowly, one site and one scan at a time, and slows down further or pauses when a site asks it to (HTTP 429 or Retry-After).
• It stops if a firewall asks for a browser check, and does not try to get around it.

Where it connects from

AHXBot always connects from 15.207.133.252. A request that says AHXBot but comes from another address is not AHXBot.

Letting it through your firewall

Allow requests whose user agent contains AHXBot and that come from the address above. In Cloudflare, a WAF custom rule with the action Skip:

(http.user_agent contains "AHXBot" and ip.src in {15.207.133.252})

Alternatively, site owners can create a scan key on the AHX site audit page. AHXBot sends it as the X-AHX-Scan-Key header on every request to that site. A firewall rule that allows requests with this header (for example a Cloudflare custom rule with the Skip action) lets audits run at full speed while everyone else keeps your normal protection.

Blocking it

Disallow AHXBot in robots.txt, or block the user agent in your firewall. Questions: support@ahxlabs.com. More about AHX SEO Labs on the home page.