Diffbot's AI agents and crawlers

AI assistants

Fetches pages for a person, in real time, while they use an AI assistant. Almost always allow it. Blocking it means the assistant can't read your pages when a customer asks about you, so it answers from somewhere else.

• Diffbot-User

AI training crawlers

Collects public pages that may be used to train AI models. 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.

• Diffbot: Diffbot's crawler, which turns web pages into structured data for its Knowledge Graph and AI products.

Robots.txt for every Diffbot agent

To keep Diffbot's training crawlers out but still let its assistants, search and agents in:

User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /

To block every Diffbot agent that reads robots.txt. This also keeps out the ones acting for your customers and the ones that send you visitors, so think twice:

User-agent: Diffbot
User-agent: Diffbot-User
Disallow: /

Robots.txt is a request, not a lock, and some agents that act for a person in real time may not read it. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.

How to tell if it's really Diffbot

Our registry doesn't verify Diffbot's agents against published IP ranges, so treat a request that uses one of their names as a claim, not proof. Ghost Agent Lab reports these requests as unverified rather than guessing.