What is ds9?
ds9 is operated by Copyright Clearance Center and crawls websites to gather information about published content for copyright licensing and rights management purposes. This bot helps identify and track copyrighted materials across the web to facilitate proper licensing agreements between content owners and users. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
ds9 visits with a shopping list. Expect focused, repeated requests to the pages its clients monitor, like pricing, product listings, and announcements, on schedules ranging from hourly to weekly. Sites outside a client's watchlist may never see it at all.
Overview
| Operated By | Copyright Clearance Center |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 6, 2026 |
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
As of July 6, 2026, 0% of top websites block ds9 in their robots.txt files.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
As of July 6, 2026, 3.3% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
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.
ds9's User Agent
| User Agent | ds9 2.000.7sm(+https://data.dss.sps.copyright.com/docs/user_agent.html) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block ds9
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block ds9 from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: ds9 # https://knownagents.com/agents/ds9
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block ds9?
Decide who benefits. ds9 collects pricing, product, and brand data for its operator's clients, and those clients can include your competitors. Allow it if visibility in market research matters to you. Block it if you would rather not hand competitors structured data about your business. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for ds9 right now.
Does ds9 Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. ds9 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 ds9 actually honors it.
Does ds9 Access Private Content?
Public business information is the target. Pricing pages, product listings, and announcements are what its clients pay for. ds9 has no special access, but assume everything you publish openly gets collected.
Why Is ds9 Visiting My Website?
A client of Copyright Clearance Center is monitoring your market, your brand, or you specifically. Expect ds9's visits to concentrate on pages with business value, like pricing and product pages.
How Can I Tell if ds9 Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks ds9 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 "ds9". Look for repeated visits to pricing, product, and news pages. Keep in mind that ds9 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.