Cotoyogi user agent
Operated by ROIS
Cotoyogi is the crawler of ROIS that collects Japanese-language web content for AI training.
The Cotoyogi bot at a glance
- Cotoyogi is operated by ROIS and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models.
- The robots.txt token for Cotoyogi is Cotoyogi.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- Cotoyogi robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is Cotoyogi?
Cotoyogi gathers pages to build Japanese AI training data for research.
ROIS documents how to block it with robots.txt.
Should you block Cotoyogi?
Blocking Cotoyogi 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 | Yes |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow Cotoyogi
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 Cotoyogi is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block Cotoyogi
User-agent: Cotoyogi
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Cotoyogi
User-agent: Cotoyogi
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Cotoyogi out of private areas only
User-agent: Cotoyogi
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Cotoyogi
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Cotoyogi)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Cotoyogi
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Cotoyogi) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Cotoyogi")How to verify real Cotoyogi traffic
ROIS publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Cotoyogi, 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 Cotoyogi in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Cotoyogi requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Cotoyogi" 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.
Cotoyogi FAQ
Cotoyogi uses the robots.txt token "Cotoyogi". ROIS does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Yes. ROIS states that Cotoyogi follows robots.txt rules written for the "Cotoyogi" token.
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: Cotoyogi" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. ROIS publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Cotoyogi, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Cotoyogi", for example with: grep -i "Cotoyogi" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: ROIS crawler documentation. 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.
