Question
What is CCBot?
CCBot is the crawler for Common Crawl, a nonprofit that publishes a free, open web archive. Because that archive is a common source for AI training datasets, blocking CCBot is one upstream way to reduce how often your content ends up in third-party training corpora.
Why CCBot matters for AI
- Common Crawl snapshots are widely reused to build LLM training sets.
- Blocking CCBot affects the archive, not any single AI vendor — broad but indirect.
- It has no effect on Google or Bing search ranking.
Allow or block
- Allow: you are fine with open archiving and broad reuse.
- Block: you want to limit downstream training inclusion at the source.
robots.txt
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /Related pages: should I block Bytespider, should I allow GPTBot, AI crawler user agents.