What is CCBot?
CCBot is Common Crawl's web crawler that creates an open repository of web data, making crawled content universally accessible for research, analysis, and AI training purposes. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
CCBot 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 | Common Crawl |
| 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, 21% of top websites block CCBot 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.
CCBot's User Agent
| User Agent | CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block CCBot
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block CCBot from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: CCBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/ccbot
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block CCBot?
Block it if you want control over how your work trains AI models. CCBot 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, 21% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for CCBot.
Does CCBot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. CCBot 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 CCBot actually honors it.
Does CCBot Access Private Content?
CCBot 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 CCBot Visiting My Website?
Your content matched what Common Crawl wants in a training dataset. CCBot discovers pages mechanically, through links from other sites, sitemaps, and seed lists, not because anyone chose your site personally.
How Can I Tell if CCBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks CCBot 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 "CCBot". Look for broad sweeps that fetch large numbers of pages in sequence. Keep in mind that CCBot 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.