Bytespider

Last updated 19 hours ago.

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.

You can set up agent analytics to see when Bytespider visits your website.

Detail

Operator

ByteDance

Type

AI Data Scraper

Downloads web content to train AI models

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

Bytespider Visiting Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with the API or WordPress plugin.

Set Up Agent Analytics

Other Websites

15%

15% of top websites are blocking Bytespider

Learn How →

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

You can block Bytespider or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. We recommend setting up agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent Token	Description
`Bytespider`	Should match instances of Bytespider

# robots.txt
# This should block Bytespider

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

Instead of doing this manually, you can use the API or Wordpress plugin to keep your robots.txt updated with the latest known AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt