Crawler directory · AI training crawler
CCBot: user agent, robots.txt rules, and how to allow or block it
CCBot builds Common Crawl’s open archive of the web, a dataset many downstream language models are trained on. Blocking it keeps future crawls of your site out of that corpus.
- Operator
- Common Crawl
- Feeds
- Common Crawl open web corpus
- Type
- AI training crawler
- robots.txt token
- CCBot
CCBot user agent
Requests from CCBot carry a User-Agent header like this (example — vendors change version numbers, so match on the token CCBot, not the whole string):
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
To see how often it visits, filter your access log with grep -i "CCBot" access.log. A User-Agent can be faked, so treat it as a claim, not proof.
Official documentation: commoncrawl.org. Vendors change their crawlers, so check it for the current details.
Should you allow or block CCBot?
Blocking stops future crawls from being used for model training. It does not remove content already collected, and it does not stop you being cited in live answers, which use separate retrieval bots.
robots.txt rules for CCBot
Put these in the robots.txt at the root of your domain.
Block CCBot
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
Explicitly allow CCBot
User-agent: CCBot Allow: /
Block only part of your site
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
robots.txt states your policy; it does not enforce it. A CDN or firewall can block a bot your robots.txt allows, which is why it is worth testing rather than assuming.
Check what your site does today
The free AI bot checker reads your robots.txt and tells you whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and nine other AI crawlers are allowed, blocked or crawling by default, then runs a live GPTBot fetch to prove your content is actually served.
Check my site free →Questions, answered
What is CCBot?+
CCBot builds Common Crawl’s open archive of the web, a dataset many downstream language models are trained on. Blocking it keeps future crawls of your site out of that corpus.
How do I block CCBot in robots.txt?+
Add these two lines to the robots.txt at the root of your domain: User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / User-agent tokens are matched case-insensitively. The rule applies from the crawler's next visit; it does not delete anything already collected.
Will blocking CCBot affect my Google rankings?+
No. CCBot is separate from Googlebot, so blocking it does not change how Google Search indexes or ranks you. Blocking stops future crawls from being used for model training. It does not remove content already collected, and it does not stop you being cited in live answers, which use separate retrieval bots.
What does the CCBot user agent look like?+
An example User-Agent header is: CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/). Vendors change version numbers, so match on the token CCBot rather than the whole string. A User-Agent can be spoofed, so verify important traffic against the vendor's published details before trusting it.
Related crawlers
More on the trade-offs in the AI bot policies guide and the robots.txt guide.