Does CCBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that CCBot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.

How do I block CCBot?

Add the CCBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.

IPScanner

Dataset builders

CCBot

Q: How do I verify a request really came from CCBot?

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. Common Crawl publishes no IP list and runs from rented cloud capacity, so the address alone proves nothing. Its archive is a training input for many models, which is why blocking it has knock-on effects. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

CCBot is a bot operated by Common Crawl Foundation that crawls pages into a dataset that may be reused or shared with third parties. Web archive going back to 2008. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.

Verify an IP that claimed to be CCBot

No operator check exists for CCBot, so this will not be able to confirm the name. What it can still tell you is what the address actually is: which network announces it, and whether it is a hosting range, a residential proxy or a Tor exit.

The check needs JavaScript. The evidence it uses is public either way: the operator's own documentation says how a request claiming to be CCBot can be verified, and the table below repeats it.

CCBot at a glance

Reference data for the CCBot crawler
User agent	`CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)`
Operator	Common Crawl Foundation
Purpose	Provides open crawl dataset, used for many purposes, including Machine Learning/AI.
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	None published, user agent only Common Crawl publishes no IP list and runs from rented cloud capacity, so the address alone proves nothing. Its archive is a training input for many models, which is why blocking it has knock-on effects. https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot
Crawl pattern	Monthly at present.
Robots.txt tokens	`CCBot`
Operator documentation	https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot

Web archive going back to 2008. Cited in thousands of research papers per year.

robots.txt

Allow or block CCBot

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block CCBot

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow CCBot

User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking CCBot keeps your pages out of the datasets it builds from future crawls. It does not remove anything collected earlier, and how each operator uses or shares its data varies, so check their policy.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really CCBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy CCBot precisely because site owners allow it. Common Crawl publishes no IP list and runs from rented cloud capacity, so the address alone proves nothing. Its archive is a training input for many models, which is why blocking it has knock-on effects.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

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Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

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