cohere-ai user agent
Operated by Cohere
cohere-ai is a Cohere user agent reported as retrieving web pages in response to user prompts.
The cohere-ai bot at a glance
- cohere-ai is operated by Cohere and fetches a page when a person asks an AI assistant about it or shares its link.
- The robots.txt token for cohere-ai is cohere-ai.
- Blocking an AI assistant fetcher has no effect on search rankings.
- cohere-ai robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is cohere-ai?
cohere-ai is listed as fetching data when a Cohere product user asks for it.
Cohere has not published a crawler page for this name.
Should you block cohere-ai?
Blocking cohere-ai 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 assistant fetcher has no effect on search rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking stops the assistant from reading your page when a user asks about it or pastes your link, so its answer falls back to other sources. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow cohere-ai
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 cohere-ai is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop cohere-ai, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block cohere-ai
User-agent: cohere-ai
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow cohere-ai
User-agent: cohere-ai
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep cohere-ai out of private areas only
User-agent: cohere-ai
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to cohere-ai
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(cohere\-ai)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to cohere-ai
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (cohere\-ai) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "cohere-ai")How to verify real cohere-ai traffic
Cohere publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for cohere-ai, 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 cohere-ai in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts cohere-ai requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "cohere-ai" 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.
cohere-ai FAQ
cohere-ai uses the robots.txt token "cohere-ai". Cohere does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Cohere has not documented how cohere-ai treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an AI assistant fetcher has no effect on search rankings. Blocking stops the assistant from reading your page when a user asks about it or pastes your link, so its answer falls back to other sources.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: cohere-ai" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Cohere publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for cohere-ai, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "cohere-ai", for example with: grep -i "cohere-ai" 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.
