Bytespider
ByteDance · Model training · robots.txt token bytespider
6% of 30,177 measured domains disallow bytespider in robots.txt at the site root. Separately, and independently of robots.txt, 17.4% of 30,185 reachable domains refuse an AI crawler user agent at the network edge on two consecutive probes from different locations - a refusal the site's own robots.txt does not declare and its owner often has not chosen.
Measured 2026-10-06 by direct request to every domain in the corpus. Method: how this is measured. Reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.
Cite as: Crawl Census, "Bytespider blocking rate", measured 2026-10-06. https://crawlcensus.com/bot/bytespider
What it is definition
Downloads content to train ByteDance LLMs and is widely reported to ignore robots.txt directives.
Bytespider is operated by ByteDance and classified here as model training. These agents collect text and images that may end up in a training corpus. Disallowing one withholds new content from the next model. It does not withdraw anything collected before the disallow, and it does not remove the site from any answer engine.
Disallowing bytespider withholds content crawled from that point on from ByteDance's training data. It does not withdraw pages collected in earlier crawls, it does not reach copies already sitting in third-party datasets, and it does not remove the site from any answer surface.
- robots.txt token
- bytespider
- Operator
- ByteDance
- Purpose
- Model training
- Honors robots.txt
- no
- Documentation
- https://knownagents.com/agents/bytespider
Identity on the wire exact string
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com)curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com)' https://example.com/Replace the host with your own. A 403, a challenge page or an empty body means the edge is blocking the agent whatever robots.txt says.
How to allow it, how to block it robots.txt
User-agent: bytespider
Allow: /Absent any rule, the agent is already allowed, so this group only matters when your * group disallows something. Naming the agent replaces the * group for it entirely, so repeat here every disallow you still want to apply to it.
User-agent: bytespider
Disallow: /Disallowing bytespider withholds content crawled from that point on from ByteDance's training data. It does not withdraw pages collected in earlier crawls, it does not reach copies already sitting in third-party datasets, and it does not remove the site from any answer surface.
Sites that block it 60 shown
See every measured domain that blocks Bytespider
This list is served from a cache rebuilt just now. It is discarded the moment a rescan records a policy change for this agent, so a site that has just changed its robots.txt will drop off it within one scan rather than waiting for the cache to expire.
Compare ByteDance
ByteDance runs 2 agents in this registry, and they do different jobs. Blocking one says nothing about the others.
Common questions answered
Does blocking Bytespider remove me from ByteDance's AI products?
No, not by itself. Bytespider collects content for training, not for the index that answers questions. ByteDance's answer surfaces are governed separately by tiktokspider, which stays allowed unless you disallow it too. Content collected before the disallow is not withdrawn. ByteDance documents this agent as not bound by robots.txt, so the disallow is a request rather than a control; see the blocking section for the edge rule that is.
How do I verify Bytespider requests are genuine?
ByteDance publishes neither reverse DNS names nor address ranges for Bytespider, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be authenticated. The string is trivially spoofed and is routinely reused by unrelated scrapers. Treat it as a hint, rate-limit by source address, and do not grant it access you would not grant an anonymous client.
Check your own site free
See whether your robots.txt admits Bytespider today, and whether your edge agrees with it.