What is CCBot? How to allow or block Common Crawl's crawler

CCBot builds Common Crawl, the open web archive that has served as foundational training data for many large language models, including early GPT models. Blocking CCBot is the single broadest AI-training opt-out available, since dozens of model builders consume the Common Crawl dataset downstream.

Does CCBot respect robots.txt?

Common Crawl is a nonprofit with a long public record of honoring robots.txt and crawl-delay directives.

Should you block CCBot?

Blocking CCBot opts your content out of Common Crawl's model training — a legitimate choice for original content you don't want reproduced by AI. The trade-off: models trained without your content are less likely to know your brand or recommend it unprompted. There is no direct traffic loss today, since training crawlers don't send visitors. See our guide on whether to block AI bots for the full decision framework.

Check and monitor CCBot on your site

• AI Crawler Access Checker — see whether your current robots.txt allows or blocks CCBot.
• robots.txt Generator for AI Bots — build a robots.txt with per-bot rules for all 15 known AI crawlers.
• AI Bot Log Analyzer — paste server logs and count real CCBot hits, entirely in your browser.