CCBot

CCBot is the crawler operated by the Common Crawl Foundation, a non-profit organization. Its primary mission is to build and maintain a free, open repository of web crawl data that is accessible to anyone. This corpus contains petabytes of data collected since 2008, including raw web page data, metadata extracts, and text. Researchers, academics, and corporations use this data for large-scale analysis and to train foundation models.

The official user-agent token for the crawler is CCBot. To identify the latest version, you should check the Common Crawl website, as the string may include version numbers (e.g., CCBot/2.0). It typically respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309). You can manage its access by adding specific directives in your robots.txt file targeting the User-agent: CCBot.

The Common Crawl dataset is a foundational component of the pre-training corpora for many large language models (LLMs). Organizations use this open data to teach models grammar, facts, and reasoning patterns. However, because the crawl is a broad snapshot of the web, it requires significant post-processing, including deduplication, toxic content filtering, and quality scoring, before it can be used for effective model training.

To prevent CCBot from crawling your site entirely, use a blanket disallow rule:

• User-agent: CCBot
• Disallow: /

To block specific sensitive directories:

• User-agent: CCBot
• Disallow: /private-data/
• Disallow: /internal/

Always verify your rules using a robots.txt Tester to ensure the syntax is correct and the paths are matched as intended.

CCBot does not crawl sites as frequently as commercial search engine bots. Its crawl cycles are periodic, often occurring every few months. The crawler is designed to be polite and respects the Crawl-Delay directive if specified. However, because it fetches entire pages for archival, it can consume significant bandwidth on large sites. Monitoring server logs for CCBot activity helps in managing crawl budget.

If CCBot has already crawled your content, the data becomes part of the permanent Common Crawl archive. There is no retroactive deletion mechanism for the public dataset. To prevent future inclusion, you must implement a Disallow rule in your robots.txt. For content already ingested into derivative models, you may need to explore model unlearning requests with the specific AI developers who utilized the dataset.