CCBot
Common Crawl Foundation · Web archive · robots.txt token ccbot
What it is definition
Builds the open Common Crawl web archive, a common source of LLM pretraining corpora.
CCBot is operated by Common Crawl Foundation and classified here as web archive. These agents build public web archives. Those archives are then used as pretraining corpora by parties who never crawled the site themselves, so one disallow here reaches model builders that never appear in a log file.
Disallowing ccbot keeps pages out of the Common Crawl archive. Because that archive is a common pretraining source, the effect carries to model builders who never request anything from your server directly.
- robots.txt token
- ccbot
- Operator
- Common Crawl Foundation
- Purpose
- Web archive
- Honors robots.txt
- yes
- Documentation
- https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot
Identity on the wire exact string
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)curl -A 'CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)' 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: ccbot
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: ccbot
Disallow: /Disallowing ccbot keeps pages out of the Common Crawl archive. Because that archive is a common pretraining source, the effect carries to model builders who never request anything from your server directly.
Sites that block it 60 shown
Compare Common Crawl Foundation
Common Crawl Foundation runs no other agent in this registry.
Common questions answered
Does blocking CCBot remove me from the Common Crawl archive?
Not directly. CCBot feeds the Common Crawl archive, a public dataset rather than a live answer surface. Disallowing it keeps new pages out of that dataset, and out of the training corpora built from it.
How do I verify CCBot requests are genuine?
Common Crawl publishes the user-agent string but not an address list, and crawls from Amazon EC2 space it does not enumerate. There is no reverse DNS name to check, so a request carrying this agent cannot be authenticated.
Check your own site free
See whether your robots.txt admits CCBot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.