Does TerraCotta respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that TerraCotta 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 TerraCotta?

Add these user-agent tokens (TerraCotta, Terra Cotta) 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

TerraCotta

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

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

TerraCotta is a bot operated by Ceramic AI that crawls pages into a dataset that may be reused or shared with third parties. TerraCotta is Ceramic's web crawler that indexes public content to power their web-scale search API for AI and LLMs. 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.

Also seen as Terra Cotta. Rules need to cover every token.

Verify an IP that claimed to be TerraCotta

No operator check exists for TerraCotta, 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 TerraCotta can be verified, and the table below repeats it.

TerraCotta at a glance

Reference data for the TerraCotta crawler
User agent	`TerraCotta` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Ceramic AI
Purpose	Dataset builders
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	None published, user agent only No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof.
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`TerraCottaTerra Cotta`
Operator documentation	None published

TerraCotta is Ceramic's web crawler that indexes public content to power their web-scale search API for AI and LLMs.

robots.txt

Allow or block TerraCotta

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 TerraCotta

User-agent: TerraCotta
User-agent: Terra Cotta
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow TerraCotta

User-agent: TerraCotta
User-agent: Terra Cotta
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: TerraCotta
User-agent: Terra Cotta
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 TerraCotta 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 TerraCotta?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy TerraCotta precisely because site owners allow it. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof.

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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