What is TerraCotta?
TerraCotta is Ceramic's web crawler that indexes public content to power their web-scale search API for AI and LLMs. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
TerraCotta crawls systematically and at volume, because it feeds an index that many AI customers query. Expect recurring visits that cover large parts of your site rather than single pages. Bursts often trace back to a customer request on its end rather than anything on yours.
Overview
| Operated By | Ceramic |
| 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, 2% of top websites block TerraCotta in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Data Provider Traffic
As of July 7, 2026, 0.3% of all web traffic came from AI data providers.
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.
TerraCotta's User Agent
| User Agent | TerraCotta https://github.com/CeramicTeam/CeramicTerracotta |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block TerraCotta
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block TerraCotta from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: TerraCotta # https://knownagents.com/agents/terracotta
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block TerraCotta?
Decide how you feel about redistribution. A single crawl from TerraCotta can supply your content to many AI companies for training, search, and retrieval, so allowing it spreads your content across products you have no relationship with. Blocking it costs some AI visibility and nothing in traditional search. For comparison, 2% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for TerraCotta.
Does TerraCotta Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. TerraCotta 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 TerraCotta actually honors it.
Does TerraCotta Access Private Content?
TerraCotta targets public pages, but at industrial scale. Some providers route requests through large proxy networks that sidestep rate limits and geographic blocks. Content you want kept out of AI systems is safer behind real authentication than behind soft barriers.
Why Is TerraCotta Visiting My Website?
One of Ceramic's customers requested data your site contains, or your pages are part of TerraCotta's standing index. A single fetch can end up serving many downstream AI applications.
How Can I Tell if TerraCotta Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks TerraCotta 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 "TerraCotta". Look for systematic crawling that returns on a schedule. Keep in mind that TerraCotta 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.