What is Bytespider ?
Bytespider is a web crawler operated by ByteDance, the Chinese technology company behind platforms like TikTok and Toutiao. The bot is used to collect publicly available web content, presumably for use in training large language models (LLMs) such as Doubao, ByteDance’s generative AI assistant. According to analysis by DataDome, Bytespider has shown large-scale scraping behavior and is frequently associated with data gathering activities linked to LLM training.
Who is operating Bytespider ?
Bytespider is operated by ByteDance Ltd., a global tech firm headquartered in Beijing, China. ByteDance develops and deploys AI technologies across its content platforms and has been building foundational AI models that require large corpora of textual data. The bot is reportedly used as part of this infrastructure. More on ByteDance can be found at bytedance.com.
Why you should be interested in Bytespider ?
As a site owner, you should know that Bytespider’s purpose goes far beyond standard indexing. It is used to extract large volumes of text and media for AI training. This has direct implications for bandwidth, data usage, and intellectual property exposure. Additionally, numerous bot monitoring services—including DataDome and HumanSignal—have flagged Bytespider for not consistently respecting robots.txt exclusions, meaning administrative action may be needed to enforce access control.
How to block Bytespider ?
1. Robots.txt File:
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file
# block Bytespider User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: /
2. User-Agent Filtering:
Add a rule in your web server configuration (e.g., Nginx, Apache) to deny access to the user-agent string “Bytespider”.
3. IP-based Blocking:
Monitor server logs for repeated requests tied to Bytespider and configure firewall rules if needed. Reports indicate its requests often originate from IPs tied to Alibaba Cloud.
About the bot
Owner: ByteDance Ltd.
Owner URL: bytedance.com
Bot URL: datadome.co
Bot User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 Bytespider
Respects robots.txt: Yes
