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# How to Measure SemrushBot

SemrushBot is an SEO tool crawler. Measure hit volume and cost in logs. It has no ads API and should never enter your conversion destinations.

Source: https://usehardal.com/blog/how-to-measure-semrushbot-traffic
Published: 2026-08-12
Updated: 2026-08-12
Author: Ecem Bircan
Category: Marketing

---

**SemrushBot** visits so Semrush can build its own SEO dataset (rank tracking, site audits, backlinks). It is an **SEO tool crawler**. Hardal's AI Visibility categories include SEO tools as their own bucket, distinct from trainers, searchers, and fetchers ([What is AI Visibility?](https://usehardal.com/ai-visibility)).

It does not buy ads and it does not carry `oppref`. Send its hits to OpenAI Ads, Meta CAPI, or GA4 as conversions and every cost-per-conversion you report comes out wrong.

## How it shows up

User-agent contains `SemrushBot` (and related Semrush UAs). Volume can be large on competitive sites. It shows up in CDN and origin logs and nowhere else.

Treat it like [AhrefsBot](https://usehardal.com/blog/how-to-measure-ahrefsbot-traffic): infrastructure and crawl-budget, not acquisition.

## What to report

- Request volume and bandwidth (this is a cost and WAF topic)
- Whether you allow it (teams that pay for Semrush usually do)
- That it is excluded from conversion destinations and from "AI visibility" narratives about ChatGPT citations

If SemrushBot is hammering staging or faceted URLs, that is a robots.txt / crawl-control ticket. If GPTBot is hammering `/pricing`, that is a training-corpus ticket. Those two tickets go to different people.

## robots.txt

Allow if you want Semrush's own products to see you the way the tool expects:

```
User-agent: SemrushBot
Allow: /
```

Throttle or Disallow if the crawl is hurting origin and you do not need the tool's view of your site. This has no effect on Googlebot.

## How Hardal measures it

Use the SEO-tools category in [AI Visibility](https://usehardal.com/ai-visibility) so SemrushBot is not plotted as OpenAI. Do not connect it to the [OpenAI Ads destination](https://usehardal.com/blog/hardal-chatgpt). For actual ChatGPT paid media, [how to measure ChatGPT Ads](https://usehardal.com/blog/how-to-measure-chatgpt-ads).