Dataset builders
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.
Request says
"CCBot/2.0"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for CCBot. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| 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 | Honourssource |
| Verification method | Claim onlyNone 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. |
| 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
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
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.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.