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. You can see how often Bytespider visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

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.

Type

Detail

Insights

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Data Scrapers

Top Visited Website Categories

Robots.txt

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.

How Do I Block Bytespider?

You can block Bytespider or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: Bytespider # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/bytespider
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.