Archives and Research Crawlers
TurnitinBot user agent
Operated by Turnitin
TurnitinBot is Turnitin's crawler, which collects public pages to compare student work against for plagiarism detection.
The TurnitinBot bot at a glance
- TurnitinBot is operated by Turnitin and fetches pages to power a specific product feature.
- The robots.txt token for TurnitinBot is TurnitinBot.
- Blocking an archive crawler has no effect on search rankings.
- TurnitinBot robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is TurnitinBot?
TurnitinBot adds web content to the database Turnitin checks submitted papers against.
Blocking it has no effect on search or AI visibility.
Should you block TurnitinBot?
Blocking TurnitinBot is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an archive crawler has no effect on search rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Archived copies can be reused by researchers and AI datasets; blocking stops new snapshots but does not remove existing ones. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow TurnitinBot
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 TurnitinBot is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop TurnitinBot, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block TurnitinBot
User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow TurnitinBot
User-agent: TurnitinBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep TurnitinBot out of private areas only
User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to TurnitinBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(TurnitinBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to TurnitinBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (TurnitinBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "TurnitinBot")How to verify real TurnitinBot traffic
Turnitin publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for TurnitinBot, 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 TurnitinBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts TurnitinBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "TurnitinBot" 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.
TurnitinBot user agent string
The full user agent Turnitin publishes for TurnitinBot. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
TurnitinBot (https://turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)TurnitinBot FAQ
TurnitinBot identifies itself with the robots.txt token "TurnitinBot". A typical request header reads: TurnitinBot (https://turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)
Turnitin has not documented how TurnitinBot treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an archive crawler has no effect on search rankings. Archived copies can be reused by researchers and AI datasets; blocking stops new snapshots but does not remove existing ones.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: TurnitinBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Turnitin publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for TurnitinBot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "TurnitinBot", for example with: grep -i "TurnitinBot" 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.
