Bytespider
What is Bytespider?
About
Bytespider is a web crawler operated by ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok. It's allegedly used to download training data for its LLMs (Large Language Model) including those powering ChatGPT competitor Doubao.
Type
Expected Behavior
It's generally unclear how AI Data Scrapers choose which websites to crawl and how often to crawl them. They might choose to visits websites with a higher information density more frequently, depending on the type of AI models they're training. For example, it would make sense that an agent training an LLM (Large Language Model) would favor sites with a lot of regularly updating text content.
Insights
Other Websites
Access Control
Should I Block Bytespider?
It's up to you. AI data scrapers usually download publicly available internet content, which is freely accessible by default. However, you might want to block them if you're concerned about attribution or how your creative work could be used in the resulting AI model.
Using Robots.txt
| User Agent Token | Description |
|---|---|
Bytespider |
Should match instances of Bytespider |
You can block Bytespider or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt.
# robots.txt
# This blocks Bytespider
User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /