AI crawler · Common Crawl · Model training
CCBot: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
CCBot is Common Crawl's AI training crawler. Builds Common Crawl's open web archive, a dataset widely used to train AI models. In our 13 October 2026 study, 353 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (15.1%) disallow CCBot. Part of the AI crawler list.
What CCBot does
Operator: Common Crawl. Job: Model training. Obeys robots.txt.
“CCBot is an automated crawler, checking first the robots.txt, and if crawling a page is allowed, fetches pages using HTTP GET requests.”
Common Crawl's CCBot documentationPublished IP ranges (JSON)
CCBot user agent
robots.txt token: CCBot (matched case-insensitively).
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)robots.txt: allow or block CCBot
Allow
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /Block
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /Training only, not citations. Blocking it is a training opt-out. It doesn't decide whether any AI search answer can cite you.
Once a group names CCBot, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block CCBot
Disallow CCBot in robots.txt
15.1%
353 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 353 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (15.1%) disallow CCBot.
Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Method and CSV in the study.
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way CCBot does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.
Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in
What it checks
- robots.txt for CCBot
- Finds the group CCBot obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
- What your CDN lets through
- Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
- Content without JavaScript
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.
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Questions
What is CCBot?+
CCBot is Common Crawl's AI training crawler. Builds Common Crawl's open web archive, a dataset widely used to train AI models.
What is CCBot's user agent?+
Common Crawl documents it as: CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/). Match on the token CCBot, since version numbers change.
How do I block CCBot?+
Add "User-agent: CCBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per Common Crawl.
Does blocking CCBot affect AI search citations?+
Blocking it is a training opt-out. It doesn't decide whether any AI search answer can cite you.
How many websites block CCBot?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 353 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (15.1%) disallow CCBot.