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 for public use. The data collected by CCBot is often used in the training of large-scale language models, as well as for research in natural language processing and web-scale data mining. The bot is easily identifiable by its user-agent “CCBot”, and its activity is documented on the Common Crawl website.
Who is operating CCBot ?
CCBot is maintained by Common Crawl Foundation, a US-based non-profit organization. Their mission is to democratize web data access by providing free datasets to researchers, developers, and institutions. The foundation is transparent about its crawling infrastructure and offers opt-out mechanisms via robots.txt directives. More about the organization can be found at commoncrawl.org.
Why you should be interested in CCBot ?
From a webmaster’s perspective, CCBot plays a unique role: it doesn’t serve commercial indexing purposes but supports open AI and academic research. However, its crawls can still create bandwidth usage and expose content to downstream model training pipelines. Importantly, many commercial LLMs (e.g., OpenAI, Meta) have historically used Common Crawl data. If you want to control whether your site is part of such corpora, consider explicitly managing access.
How to block CCBot ?
1. Robots.txt File:
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file
# block CCBot User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
2. User-Agent Filtering:
Use server-side filters (e.g., in Nginx or Apache) to block requests matching “CCBot” in the User-Agent header.
3. Rate Limiting or Monitoring:
While CCBot respects robots.txt, you can additionally monitor its behavior via server logs and implement rate limits if needed.
About the bot
Owner: Common Crawl Foundation
Owner URL: commoncrawl.org
Bot URL: commoncrawl.org
Bot User Agent: CCBot/2.0
Respects robots.txt: Yes
