CCBot

What is CCBot?

CCBot is a web crawler operated by Common Crawl, a non-profit organization that builds and maintains an open repository of web crawl data that can be accessed and analyzed by anyone. The bot functions as an automated web crawler that systematically browses the internet to collect and archive web content for the Common Crawl corpus. This extensive dataset is used by researchers, businesses, and AI companies to train large language models and conduct web-scale data analysis.

In server logs, CCBot identifies itself with the user-agent string CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/), which includes a direct link to Common Crawl's FAQ page for administrators seeking more information. The crawler has been active since around 2011, making it one of the more established web crawlers in operation.

CCBot employs a distributed crawling architecture to efficiently scan billions of web pages. It follows links between pages, downloads content, and processes it for inclusion in the Common Crawl dataset. The crawler is designed to be respectful of website resources and adheres to the robots.txt protocol, which allows website owners to specify which parts of their sites should not be crawled.

Why is CCBot crawling my site?

CCBot visits websites to collect content for the Common Crawl dataset. It typically targets publicly accessible web pages, including articles, blog posts, product listings, and other text-rich content. The crawler aims to create a comprehensive snapshot of the public web, so if your site is publicly available, CCBot may visit it as part of its regular crawling schedule.

The frequency of CCBot visits depends on various factors, including your site's size, popularity, and how often its content changes. High-traffic sites with frequently updated content may see more regular visits from CCBot. The crawler is triggered to visit sites based on its crawling algorithms and scheduling systems, not necessarily by specific actions on your website.

CCBot's crawling is generally considered authorized for publicly accessible content, as it respects robots.txt directives and follows ethical crawling practices. Common Crawl is transparent about its operations and provides website owners with mechanisms to control the bot's access.

What is the purpose of CCBot?

CCBot collects web data to build and maintain the Common Crawl corpus, which serves as a valuable resource for researchers, developers, and organizations. This dataset supports a wide range of applications, including:

• Training data for artificial intelligence and machine learning models, particularly large language models
• Academic research on internet trends, language patterns, and web structures
• Market research and competitive analysis
• Development of search technologies and information retrieval systems

The data collected by CCBot is processed, archived, and made freely available to the public through Common Crawl's dataset releases. These datasets are published regularly and can be accessed by anyone, making them particularly valuable for organizations that cannot afford to run their own web-scale crawling operations.

For website owners, CCBot's crawling contributes to broader visibility and inclusion in AI training datasets, which may indirectly benefit their content's reach. However, some site owners may have concerns about bandwidth usage or the inclusion of their content in publicly accessible datasets.

How do I block CCBot?

CCBot respects the robots.txt protocol, making it straightforward to control its access to your website. To completely block CCBot from crawling your site, add the following directives to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

This tells CCBot not to crawl any part of your website. If you only want to block access to specific sections or files, you can use more targeted directives:

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members/
Disallow: /confidential-data.html

Common Crawl also honors the Robots META tag and HTTP headers for more granular control. If you want to allow CCBot to crawl your pages but prevent the content from being included in the Common Crawl dataset, you can use the "noarchive" directive in your pages' META tags.

You can verify that your robots.txt directives are correctly formatted using Google's robots.txt testing tool or similar services. Keep in mind that while blocking CCBot will prevent your content from appearing in the Common Crawl dataset, it may also reduce your site's representation in AI models and research that rely on this data. If you have specific concerns about how your content is used, you may want to review Common Crawl's FAQ page for more detailed information about their data usage policies and practices.