Kuldeep Paul

Model training · Common Crawl

CCBot

Builds Common Crawl's open web archive, one of the most widely used sources of LLM training data. Blocking CCBot keeps future crawls of your site out of the dataset.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

19%of top sites fully block CCBot
1,085sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
121of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
Common Crawl
Purpose
Model training
Used for
Common Crawl open dataset
Obeys robots.txt
Yes
robots.txt token
CCBot
User-agent string
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
IP list
index.commoncrawl.org/ccbot.json
Official docs
commoncrawl.org

Block CCBot in robots.txt

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

Well-known sites that block CCBot

amazon.com #30, yahoo.com #72, amazonvideo.com #85, vimeo.com #87, msn.com #92, chatgpt.com #112, t-online.de #129, snapchat.com #157, tumblr.com #160, nytimes.com #163, gravatar.com #165, ebay.com #191, cnn.com #195, theguardian.com #196, bbc.com #216, forter.com #220, sciencedirect.com #224, bbc.co.uk #236, weather.com #250, who.int #271, canva.com #276, launchpad.net #281, nature.com #297, amazon.co.uk #326

Ranks from the Tranco list. Full per-site data in the robots.txt study.

Questions

What is CCBot?

CCBot is a model training bot operated by Common Crawl, used for Common Crawl open dataset. Builds Common Crawl's open web archive, one of the most widely used sources of LLM training data. Blocking CCBot keeps future crawls of your site out of the dataset.

How do I block CCBot?

Add "User-agent: CCBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect.

Does CCBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. Common Crawl documents that CCBot honours robots.txt directives.

How many websites block CCBot?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 19% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed CCBot.

Analysis using this data

  1. Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
  2. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

← All AI crawlers

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/ccbot), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's CCBot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). CCBot — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/ccbot

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "CCBot — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/ccbot.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "CCBot — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/ccbot.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026ccbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {CCBot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/ccbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/ccbot">CCBot — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)