Does Diffbot respect robots.txt?

Not documented. No operator statement says whether Diffbot reads robots.txt, so add the rule but verify in your logs that the requests actually stop.

How do I block Diffbot?

Add the Diffbot 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

Data scrapers and resellers

Diffbot

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

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. Whether it obeys robots.txt is set per customer, so two Diffbot crawls of the same site can behave differently. No published IP list. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

Diffbot is a bot that crawls pages into a dataset that is then reused or sold. Diffbot is a web crawler that extracts and structures website content using AI-powered visual understanding, providing knowledge graph data for applications like market i…. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.

Diffbot at a glance

Reference data for the Diffbot crawler
User agent	`Diffbot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Diffbot
Purpose	Data scrapers and resellers
Respects robots.txt	Not documented
Verification method	None published, user agent only Whether it obeys robots.txt is set per customer, so two Diffbot crawls of the same site can behave differently. No published IP list. https://docs.diffbot.com/docs/en/guides-diffbot-crawler
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`Diffbot`
Operator documentation	None published

Diffbot is a web crawler that extracts and structures website content using AI-powered visual understanding, providing knowledge graph data for applications like market i…

robots.txt

Allow or block Diffbot

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 Diffbot

User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow Diffbot

User-agent: Diffbot
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: Diffbot
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 Diffbot stops your content being packaged and resold to third parties. Whoever bought earlier crawls still has them.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really Diffbot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Diffbot precisely because site owners allow it. Whether it obeys robots.txt is set per customer, so two Diffbot crawls of the same site can behave differently. No published IP list.

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

FAQ