What is Bytespider?
Bytespider is a web crawler operated by ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok. It's allegedly used to download training data for its LLMs (Large Language Model) including those powering ChatGPT competitor Doubao. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
Bytespider crawls websites to build AI training datasets, and its operator decides which sites, how often, and how deep it goes. Expect broad sweeps that fetch far more pages per visit than a search crawler would, on an unpredictable schedule. Volume can run heavy while a collection pass is underway, then stop entirely.
Overview
| Operated By | ByteDance |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 7, 2026 |
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
As of July 7, 2026, 17% of top websites block Bytespider in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Data Scraper Traffic
As of July 7, 2026, 2.4% of all web traffic came from AI data scrapers.
Top Visited Website Categories
This data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Bytespider's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block Bytespider
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Bytespider from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Bytespider # https://knownagents.com/agents/bytespider
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Bytespider?
Block it if you want control over how your work trains AI models. Bytespider downloads your content into training datasets without attribution, compensation, or any promise of traffic back. The case for allowing it is reach, because models trained on your content can surface your brand in AI answers. Neither choice changes your Google rankings. For comparison, 17% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for Bytespider.
Does Bytespider Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. Bytespider is expected to honor robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms Bytespider actually honors it.
Does Bytespider Access Private Content?
Bytespider targets public content, but the boundary is not always respected. Some training data scrapers go after paywalled or gated pages when the operator wants that data. If a page loads without signing in, assume it can be collected.
Why Is Bytespider Visiting My Website?
Your content matched what ByteDance wants in a training dataset. Bytespider discovers pages mechanically, through links from other sites, sitemaps, and seed lists, not because anyone chose your site personally.
How Can I Tell if Bytespider Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Bytespider visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "Bytespider". Look for broad sweeps that fetch large numbers of pages in sequence. Keep in mind that Bytespider doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.