Does SemrushBot-OCOB respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that SemrushBot-OCOB reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.

How do I block SemrushBot-OCOB?

Add the SemrushBot-OCOB token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.

IPScanner

Dataset builders

SemrushBot-OCOB

Q: How do I verify a request really came from SemrushBot-OCOB?

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

SemrushBot-OCOB is a bot operated by Semrush that crawls pages into a dataset that may be reused or shared with third parties. Data collected is used for the ContentShake AI tool reports. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.

Verify an IP that claimed to be SemrushBot-OCOB

No operator check exists for SemrushBot-OCOB, so this will not be able to confirm the name. What it can still tell you is what the address actually is: which network announces it, and whether it is a hosting range, a residential proxy or a Tor exit.

The check needs JavaScript. The evidence it uses is public either way: the operator's own documentation says how a request claiming to be SemrushBot-OCOB can be verified, and the table below repeats it.

SemrushBot-OCOB at a glance

Reference data for the SemrushBot-OCOB crawler
User agent	`SemrushBot-OCOB` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Semrush
Purpose	Crawls your site for ContentShake AI tool.
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	None published, user agent only No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof.
Crawl pattern	Roughly once every 10 seconds.
Robots.txt tokens	`SemrushBot-OCOB`
Operator documentation	None published

Data collected is used for the ContentShake AI tool reports.

robots.txt

Allow or block SemrushBot-OCOB

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block SemrushBot-OCOB

User-agent: SemrushBot-OCOB
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow SemrushBot-OCOB

User-agent: SemrushBot-OCOB
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: SemrushBot-OCOB
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking SemrushBot-OCOB keeps your pages out of the datasets it builds from future crawls. It does not remove anything collected earlier, and how each operator uses or shares its data varies, so check their policy.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really SemrushBot-OCOB?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy SemrushBot-OCOB precisely because site owners allow it. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

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Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

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