ICC-Crawler
What is ICC-Crawler?
About
ICC-Crawler is a web crawler operated by the Universal Communication Research Institute to collect data for multilingual translation, information analysis, artificial intelligence technologies, and other purposes. You can see how often ICC-Crawler visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.
Detail
| Operator | Universal Communication Research Institute |
| Documentation | https://ucri.nict.go.jp/en/icccrawler/ |
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.
Agent Analytics
Visits to Your Website
Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with agent analytics.
Top Websites
Robots.txt
Should I Block ICC-Crawler?
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 ICC-Crawler?
You can block ICC-Crawler 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 Token | Description |
|---|---|
ICC-Crawler |
Should match instances of ICC-Crawler |
# robots.txt
# This should block ICC-Crawler
User-agent: ICC-Crawler
Disallow: /
Recommended Solution
Instead of doing this manually, use automatic robots.txt to keep your rules updated with the latest AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.
Global Bot & LLM Traffic
AI Data Scrapers
The overall volume of internet traffic coming from AI Data Scrapers
See Global Bot & LLM Traffic →