CCBot user agent
Operated by Common Crawl
CCBot is Common Crawl's crawler that builds a free, open archive of the web used by researchers and many AI training datasets.
The CCBot bot at a glance
- CCBot is operated by Common Crawl and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models.
- The robots.txt token for CCBot is CCBot.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- CCBot robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is CCBot?
CCBot crawls the public web for the Common Crawl archive. Many large language models were trained on datasets derived from this archive.
Blocking CCBot keeps future pages out of new Common Crawl snapshots, which reduces their reach into many AI datasets at once.
Should you block CCBot?
Blocking CCBot 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 CCBot
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 CCBot is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block CCBot
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow CCBot
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep CCBot out of private areas only
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to CCBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(CCBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to CCBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (CCBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "CCBot")How to verify real CCBot traffic
Common Crawl publishes the IP ranges that CCBot uses. A request with the CCBot user agent from an IP outside that list is an impersonator.
How to find CCBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts CCBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "CCBot" 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.
CCBot user agent string
The full user agent Common Crawl publishes for CCBot. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)CCBot FAQ
CCBot identifies itself with the robots.txt token "CCBot". A typical request header reads: CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
Yes. Common Crawl states that CCBot follows robots.txt rules written for the "CCBot" 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: CCBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Yes. Common Crawl publishes the IP ranges CCBot uses. Check the request IP against that list; a matching user agent from any other IP is an impersonator.
Search your server access log for "CCBot", for example with: grep -i "CCBot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Common Crawl 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.
