CCBot

What is CCBot?

About

CCBot is Common Crawl's web crawler that creates an open repository of web data, making crawled content universally accessible for research, analysis, and AI training purposes. You can see how often CCBot 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

AI Data Scraper
Downloads web content to train AI models

Detail

Operated By Common Crawl
Last Updated 7 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

23%
23% of top websites are blocking CCBot
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
CCBot normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Data Scrapers

Top Visited Website Categories

People and Society
Books and Literature
Sports
Games
Hobbies and Leisure
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Robots.txt

Should I Block CCBot?

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 CCBot?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.

You can block CCBot 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.

User Agent String CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
# robots.txt
# This should block CCBot

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

References