Doing wildcard blocking is not smart, google doesn't always identify itself as 'googlebot'. You'll be blocking your site from legitimate search engines, there is no way you can cover all the user agent names google or bing use.
You can try specifically blocking ahrefs, majestic and so on in htaccess though like you mentioned, I guess that's a smart thing to do. Although they don't always identify themselves correctly either, so you may get crawled anyway.
You can try specifically blocking ahrefs, majestic and so on in htaccess though like you mentioned, I guess that's a smart thing to do. Although they don't always identify themselves correctly either, so you may get crawled anyway.