Ahrefs adds Bot Analytics to track AI crawlers and protect crawl budget

Ahrefs packed 24 updates into its February-and-March 2026 roundup, but the feature that stands out for agencies is Bot Analytics, a beta tool now available on all paid plans. The new system shows every bot that crawls a site, the pages it hits, and the categories it falls into, including AI assistants, search engines, SEO tools and social platforms. Ahrefs says the goal is practical: identify automated traffic, isolate AI bots, and keep crawl budget from being squandered on low-value pages and dead ends.

That matters because Ahrefs is treating bot traffic as an operational issue, not a curiosity. The company says AI bots accounted for nearly 25% of all bot requests in May 2025, and it warns that crawler activity can distort analytics while sending machines into 404s and other pages that do nothing for visibility. Bot Analytics connects through Cloudflare and offers two setup paths. Cloudflare Logpush is aimed at high-traffic sites and requires Cloudflare Enterprise, while a Cloudflare Worker can run on any Cloudflare plan. For larger properties, that split is useful: one path is built for scale, the other for simpler deployment.

The same roundup pushed Brand Radar deeper into AI visibility work. Ahrefs updated the methodology on February 26, 2026, using Google’s People Also Ask corpus, Ahrefs’ keyword database and semantic fanout to expand queries before running millions of questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Overviews or AI Mode on a rolling 90-day window. The latest changes add AI-generated custom prompts, prompt tagging, fanout query visibility in AI responses, and a wider Cited Pages report that breaks citations down by source and adds DR, UR and traffic metrics. Ahrefs also added a YouTube cited-in-AI column, extending the same visibility logic into video.

For agencies, the bigger story is access. Ahrefs’ April 28 changelog said API limits were massively increased for Lite, Standard and Advanced plans, with Standard plans getting 2.67x more credits and up to 10x more rows per request. Custom prompts are now available across more paid plans, API v3 access and Always-on Audits have expanded, and cross-tool project navigation is easier. That opens the door to cleaner internal dashboards, more client-facing reporting, and less manual stitching between tools.

Ahrefs is also pointing to real-world use. Octopus Energy said Brand Radar replaced a resource-heavy manual process for tracking AI visibility across multiple global markets and helped the team present clear findings to C-suite and global marketing teams. Taken together, the product updates show where the workflow is heading: agencies now need to watch machine traffic, not just human clicks, and the tools that surface bot behavior, citations and API data are becoming part of everyday site management.