CCBot: Common Crawl's open web archive crawler
Common Crawl's crawler.
- Free, no account.
- A few seconds.
- Nothing is stored.
CCBot at a glance
Everything Common Crawl documents about it, with links to the source.
- Operator
- Common Crawl
- Type
- AI training
- Used for
- The open web archive many models train on
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Common Crawl documents that CCBot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
- robots.txt token
CCBot- User-agent string
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
- IP addresses
- index.commoncrawl.org/ccbot.json
- Documentation
- commoncrawl.org/ccbot
How to block CCBot
Collects text that may be used to train AI models. Blocking it keeps your pages out of future training data. AI answers can still cite you through the search crawlers.
Block the whole site
Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
Block only some paths
List the paths; everything else stays open to CCBot.
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /drafts/
How to verify CCBot
Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.
- 1
Find requests whose user agent contains "CCBot" in your server or CDN logs.
- 2
Check each source IP against Common Crawl's published list (index.commoncrawl.org/ccbot.json). A request from outside it is not CCBot, whatever it says.
- 3
Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.
Other AI crawlers
Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Common Crawl's crawler. Common Crawl is a non-profit that publishes an open archive of the web, and that archive is one of the most widely used sources of training data for language models. Blocking CCBot keeps new pages out of the archive.
Yes. Common Crawl documents that CCBot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site: "User-agent: CCBot" followed by "Disallow: /". To close only part of the site, list those paths instead of "/". To enforce the block rather than request it, deny the IP addresses Common Crawl publishes at your firewall.
No. CCBot is a training crawler: blocking it keeps your pages out of data that may train Common Crawl's models. AI answers that cite pages come from search crawlers, which have their own tokens, so blocking CCBot alone does not remove you from them.
Checked against Common Crawl's documentation on 29 September 2026.
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