What is CCBot? AI crawler guide

CCBot is a crawler or fetcher associated with Common Crawl. See source-graded user-agent, robots.txt, verification, and observation guidance.

What is CCBot?

CCBot is a documented Common Crawl crawler or fetcher. Common Crawl's crawler for building public web crawl datasets used by researchers and AI builders.

Evidence status

Field Value
Evidence Officially documented
Lifecycle Active
Purpose training
robots.txt posture honors
Source checked 2026-06-11

Documented user-agent

CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)

CCBot collects pages for model training. Training inclusion is not the same as being cited, so measure where AI answers actually cite your site before drawing conclusions from crawl logs.

robots.txt allow example

User-agent: CCBot Allow: /

robots.txt block example

User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /

What the rule can and cannot do

Robots.txt expresses an access policy to compliant automated crawlers. It does not authenticate the sender, remove content already collected, or guarantee that a model will use or not use content.

How to verify a request

JavaScript behavior

The cited operator material does not verify JavaScript rendering. Serve useful HTML before client-side JavaScript where possible.

Related bots

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CCBot?

CCBot is a officially documented crawler or fetcher record associated with Common Crawl.

What user-agent does CCBot use?

CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/). Check the evidence status before attributing a matching request.

Can CCBot be blocked in robots.txt?

The record identifies CCBot as the token to review. Robots.txt is a request policy, not proof of model use or non-use.

How can I verify a CCBot request?

Treat the user-agent as a clue and look for operator-published IP, reverse-DNS, or signature guidance.

Data & Sources