Agent directory ยท AI training crawler
CCBot
Common Crawl's crawler. Common Crawl publishes a free archive of the web that many AI companies use as training data.
- Run by
- Common Crawl
- Type
- AI training crawler
- Robots.txt name
CCBot- Verifiable
- No
What CCBot does
Common Crawl's crawler. Common Crawl publishes a free archive of the web that many AI companies use as training data.
As an AI training crawler, it collects public pages that may be used to train AI models. The kinds of AI agent that visit websites.
Should you allow it?
A real business choice. Lean towards blocking if your content is the product (publishing, research, courses); lean towards allowing if your pages exist to sell something else. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.
How to allow or block CCBot
CCBot reads the CCBot group in your robots.txt. To block it everywhere:
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /To allow it everywhere, even if another rule blocks other bots:
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /Robots.txt is a request, not a lock: well-behaved crawlers follow it, impostors don't. Robots.txt for AI agents.
How it identifies itself
A typical user agent:
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)How to tell if it's really CCBot
Common Crawl doesn't publish IP ranges or a reverse DNS domain for CCBot, so a request can't be proven to come from it. Anyone can send its user agent, so treat the name alone as a claim, not proof. Ghost Agent Lab reports these requests as unverified rather than guessing.
Does CCBot visit your site? Ghost Agent Lab reads your CDN or server logs and shows every request from CCBot and 1,566+ other known agents: what they read, what your site sent back, and whether each request was genuine. See agent traffic, or check whether AI agents can use your site for free.