Diffbot user agent
Operated by Diffbot
Diffbot is a crawler that extracts and structures web content for Diffbot's knowledge graph and data products.
The Diffbot bot at a glance
- Diffbot is operated by Diffbot and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models, and fetches pages to power a specific product feature.
- The robots.txt token for Diffbot is Diffbot.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- Diffbot robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is Diffbot?
Diffbot turns pages into structured data sold for market intelligence and AI applications.
Diffbot says robots.txt compliance depends on how each Diffbot customer configures a crawl.
Should you block Diffbot?
Blocking Diffbot is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow Diffbot
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token Diffbot is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop Diffbot, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block Diffbot
User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Diffbot
User-agent: Diffbot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Diffbot out of private areas only
User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Diffbot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Diffbot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Diffbot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Diffbot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Diffbot")How to verify real Diffbot traffic
Diffbot publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Diffbot, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find Diffbot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Diffbot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Diffbot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
Diffbot FAQ
Diffbot uses the robots.txt token "Diffbot". Diffbot does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Diffbot has not documented how Diffbot treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: Diffbot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Diffbot publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Diffbot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Diffbot", for example with: grep -i "Diffbot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Public bot registry. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
