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