Does LAIONDownloader respect robots.txt?

No. LAIONDownloader is documented as ignoring robots.txt, so a Disallow line will not stop it. Blocking needs to happen at the edge, by user agent or by source address.

How do I block LAIONDownloader?

Add the LAIONDownloader 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

LAIONDownloader

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

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.

LAIONDownloader is a bot operated by Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network that crawls pages into a dataset that is then reused or sold. LAIONDownloader is a bot by LAION, a non-profit organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research. 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.

LAIONDownloader at a glance

Reference data for the LAIONDownloader crawler
User agent	`LAIONDownloader` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network
Purpose	AI tools and models for machine learning research.
Respects robots.txt	Nosource
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	`LAIONDownloader`
Operator documentation	None published

LAIONDownloader is a bot by LAION, a non-profit organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research.

robots.txt

Allow or block LAIONDownloader

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. LAIONDownloader is documented as ignoring robots.txt, so treat the block below as a statement of intent and enforce it at your CDN.

Block LAIONDownloader

User-agent: LAIONDownloader
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow LAIONDownloader

User-agent: LAIONDownloader
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: LAIONDownloader
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 LAIONDownloader 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 LAIONDownloader?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy LAIONDownloader 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

FAQ