What is CCBot?

CCBot is the web crawler operated by Common Crawl, a non-profit organization that maintains a massive, freely available archive of the web. Since 2007, Common Crawl has been crawling the internet and releasing petabytes of web data for public use.

What makes CCBot uniquely important: its data has been used to train virtually every major AI language model — including GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, LLaMA, Mistral, and many others. When you block CCBot, you’re effectively opting out of the AI training pipeline for dozens of models at once.

Why CCBot Matters More Than Other AI Crawlers

Most AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) feed data to a single company. CCBot is different:

  • One crawler, dozens of AI companies: Common Crawl data is used by OpenAI, Meta, Google, Mistral, Cohere, AI2, and many others
  • Freely downloadable: Anyone can download the entire Common Crawl archive and use it for training
  • Massive scale: Over 250 billion web pages archived since inception
  • Monthly releases: New crawl datasets released monthly

Blocking CCBot is one of the most impactful single actions you can take to opt out of AI training.

User Agent

CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)

Is Common Crawl Non-Profit?

Yes, Common Crawl is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit based in the US. Its mission is to democratize access to web data for research and education.

However, “non-profit” doesn’t mean your content isn’t used commercially — the companies downloading and using Common Crawl data (OpenAI, Meta, etc.) are very much for-profit.

What Data Does CCBot Collect?

CCBot collects:

  • Full HTML of web pages
  • HTTP headers and metadata
  • URLs and link structure

The data is stored in WARC (Web ARChive) format and released as open datasets. Common Crawl does NOT index or search content — it just stores and distributes the raw data.

Should You Block CCBot?

Allow CCBot if:

  • You support open AI research and data access
  • You want your content in public datasets for academic use
  • You’re a researcher contributing to the knowledge commons
  • Your content is already widely distributed

Block CCBot if:

  • You want maximum opt-out coverage from AI training (blocking CCBot is the highest-leverage action)
  • You’re a content creator or publisher with copyright concerns
  • You run a news or subscription media site
  • You prefer to license your data rather than give it away freely
  • You want to appear in AI tools only on your own terms

Practical tip: If you only block one AI training crawler, make it CCBot. One block prevents dozens of downstream AI companies from using your content.

How to Block CCBot

Add to your robots.txt:

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

Block specific sections:

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /articles/
Disallow: /premium/
Allow: /

Comprehensive AI training opt-out (all major trainers):

User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Disallow: /

Server-Level Blocking

Nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "CCBot") {
    return 403;
}

Apache (.htaccess)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} CCBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Does CCBot Respect robots.txt?

Yes. Common Crawl states that CCBot respects the robots.txt standard and the Robots Exclusion Protocol. This is consistently confirmed by webmasters — blocking via robots.txt works.

Important caveat: Common Crawl archives stretching back to 2007 already contain data from before widespread robots.txt blocking. Historical data may have already been used in model training.

CCBot Crawl Scale

Common Crawl releases approximately:

  • 3-5 billion pages per monthly crawl
  • 250+ billion pages in total historical archive
  • Dataset sizes in petabytes

CCBot crawl volume on individual sites varies significantly based on site size and frequency of updates.

How AI Companies Use Common Crawl Data

The typical pipeline:

  1. Common Crawl releases monthly dataset
  2. AI companies download petabytes of raw HTML
  3. They run filtering, deduplication, and quality pipelines
  4. Filtered text is used for model pre-training

Notable datasets built on Common Crawl:

  • C4 (Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus) — used in T5, Flan-T5
  • The Pile — used by EleutherAI models
  • RefinedWeb — used by Falcon models
  • RedPajama — open replication of LLaMA data
  • ROOTS — used by BLOOM multilingual model

Verifying CCBot

Confirm requests are from Common Crawl:

host [IP address]
# Should resolve to commoncrawl.org infrastructure

Common Crawl publishes their IP ranges and documentation at commoncrawl.org.

CCBot vs Other AI Crawlers

Bot Operator Type Impact
CCBot Common Crawl (non-profit) Public dataset Highest — data shared with all
GPTBot OpenAI Proprietary training Medium — OpenAI only
ClaudeBot Anthropic Proprietary training Medium — Anthropic only
Bytespider ByteDance Proprietary training Medium — ByteDance only

Test CCBot Access to Your Site

Use our AI Bot Checker to see if CCBot and other AI training crawlers can access your website.

Related AI Training Bots:

  • GPTBot - OpenAI’s AI training crawler
  • ClaudeBot - Anthropic’s AI training crawler
  • Bytespider - ByteDance’s aggressive AI crawler

AI Search Bots (different purpose — drives traffic):

For comprehensive bot testing, explore our free bot detection tools.