Bots by company
ByteDance bots and crawlers
ByteDance owns TikTok and the Doubao AI assistant.
ByteDance bots at a glance
- ByteDance runs 5 bots listed in this directory.
- They belong to: AI Training Crawlers, AI Assistant Fetchers, Search Engine Crawlers, AI Agents.
- Each ByteDance bot has its own robots.txt token, so each purpose can be allowed or blocked separately.
- Website: www.bytedance.com
Every ByteDance bot
| Bot | Group | Purpose | robots.txt | For GEO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bytespider | AI Training Crawlers | AI trainingReported | No | Consider blocking |
| DoubaoBot | AI Assistant Fetchers | AI searchAI assistantReported | Not documented | Your choice |
| TikTokSpider | AI Training Crawlers | AI trainingReported | Not documented | Your choice |
| ToutiaoSpider | Search Engine Crawlers | Search indexReported | Not documented | Allow |
| Trae | AI Agents | AI agentReported | Not documented | Your choice |
Block or allow all ByteDance bots
The rules below name every ByteDance token in this directory. To block training but keep AI search, delete the search and assistant tokens from the block rule.
robots.txt: block
# Block all ByteDance bots
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: DoubaoBot
User-agent: TikTokSpider
User-agent: ToutiaoSpider
User-agent: Trae
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow all ByteDance bots
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: DoubaoBot
User-agent: TikTokSpider
User-agent: ToutiaoSpider
User-agent: Trae
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep all ByteDance bots out of private areas only
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: DoubaoBot
User-agent: TikTokSpider
User-agent: ToutiaoSpider
User-agent: Trae
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to all ByteDance bots
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Bytespider|DoubaoBot|TikTokSpider|ToutiaoSpider|Trae)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to all ByteDance bots
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Bytespider|DoubaoBot|TikTokSpider|ToutiaoSpider|Trae) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Bytespider") or (http.user_agent contains "DoubaoBot") or (http.user_agent contains "TikTokSpider") or (http.user_agent contains "ToutiaoSpider") or (http.user_agent contains "Trae")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.
