Diffbot

Extracts structured page data for Diffbot's knowledge graph, which is licensed to AI customers.

Diffbot is operated by Diffbot 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 diffbot withholds content crawled from that point on from Diffbot'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

diffbot

Operator

Diffbot

Purpose

Model training

Honors robots.txt

yes

Documentation

https://docs.diffbot.com/docs/en/guides-diffbot-crawlbot

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Diffbot/1.0; +https://diffbot.com)

curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Diffbot/1.0; +https://diffbot.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.

Diffbot runs no other agent in this registry.

Does blocking Diffbot remove me from the Diffbot knowledge graph?

No, not by itself. Diffbot collects content for training, not for the index that answers questions. Diffbot operates no separate answer crawler in this registry, so there is no answer surface to lose here. Content collected before the disallow is not withdrawn.

How do I verify Diffbot requests are genuine?

Diffbot publishes neither reverse DNS names nor address ranges for Diffbot, 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.

See whether your robots.txt admits Diffbot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.