AI2Bot

What is AI2Bot?

AI2Bot is a web crawler developed and operated by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a non-profit research institute focused on artificial intelligence research. AI2Bot functions as an automated web crawler that systematically visits webpages to collect and analyze data for AI research purposes. The bot identifies itself in server logs with the user agent string AI2 Bot or variations that include version information such as AI2 Bot/v2.0.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence created this crawler to support their various research initiatives in natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning. AI2Bot works by sending HTTP requests to websites, downloading content, and processing that information to build datasets that power AI research and applications. Its crawling behavior typically follows links methodically through websites while respecting standard web protocols and crawl delays where specified.

Why is AI2Bot crawling my site?

AI2Bot visits websites to collect text, images, and structural information that contributes to AI research datasets. If you're seeing this bot in your logs, it's likely collecting content that aligns with AI2's research areas, such as academic publications, news articles, educational content, or general knowledge information.

The crawler typically operates continuously but distributes its requests to avoid overwhelming servers. It may visit more frequently when it discovers new content or updates to existing pages. AI2Bot's crawling is generally considered authorized as it follows standard web crawling practices and respects robots.txt directives.

Sites with substantial textual content, especially those with educational, scientific, or informational value, are more likely to attract this crawler as they provide valuable training data for language models and other AI systems.

What is the purpose of AI2Bot?

AI2Bot serves the broader mission of advancing artificial intelligence research through the collection of diverse web content. The data gathered by AI2Bot supports the development of AI systems including natural language processing models, knowledge graphs, and other machine learning applications developed by the Allen Institute.

The collected data helps train and improve AI models that can understand language, answer questions, summarize content, and perform other tasks that require broad knowledge. For website owners, having content included in AI2's datasets can mean contributing to scientific advancement, though there's no direct commercial benefit to having your site crawled.

Unlike commercial search engines, AI2Bot's primary purpose is research rather than providing a consumer-facing service. The data collected supports academic research and open science initiatives, with many of the resulting datasets and models being made available to the broader research community.

How do I block AI2Bot?

AI2Bot respects the robots.txt standard, making it straightforward to control its access to your website. To completely block the bot from your entire site, add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: AI2 Bot
Disallow: /

If you only want to block it from certain directories or pages, you can specify particular paths:

User-agent: AI2 Bot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members-only/

The Allen Institute for AI generally designs their crawlers to be good web citizens, so you can also use crawl-delay directives if you want to limit the rate at which the bot accesses your site rather than blocking it entirely:

User-agent: AI2 Bot
Crawl-delay: 10

This would instruct the bot to wait 10 seconds between requests, reducing server load.

Blocking AI2Bot may prevent your content from being included in research datasets and AI training materials. However, if your site contains sensitive information or you're concerned about server load, controlling access is entirely within your rights as a site owner. The bot should honor your robots.txt settings within a reasonable timeframe after changes are made.