Kuldeep Paul

Mixed / general · Diffbot

Diffbot

Builds Diffbot's web knowledge graph and serves extraction for AI applications. Diffbot leaves robots.txt compliance to its users' discretion.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

15.1%of top sites fully block Diffbot
862sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
102of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
Diffbot
Purpose
Mixed / general
Used for
Knowledge graph and AI data
Obeys robots.txt
Partial
robots.txt token
Diffbot
User-agent string
Not published by the operator
IP list
Not published
Official docs
diffbot.com

Block Diffbot in robots.txt

User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /

Well-known sites that block Diffbot

amazon.com #30, yahoo.com #72, amazonvideo.com #85, vimeo.com #87, msn.com #92, snapchat.com #157, nytimes.com #163, cnn.com #195, bbc.com #216, forter.com #220, sciencedirect.com #224, bbc.co.uk #236, weather.com #250, canva.com #276, launchpad.net #281, nature.com #297, amazon.co.uk #326, trustpilot.com #344, washingtonpost.com #383, bloomberg.com #386, amazon.de #387, aol.com #421, businessinsider.com #471, cnbc.com #474

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

Questions

What is Diffbot?

Diffbot is a mixed / general bot operated by Diffbot, used for Knowledge graph and AI data. Builds Diffbot's web knowledge graph and serves extraction for AI applications. Diffbot leaves robots.txt compliance to its users' discretion.

How do I block Diffbot?

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

Does Diffbot respect robots.txt?

Partly. Because Diffbot acts on a user's request, Diffbot says robots.txt rules may not always apply.

How many websites block Diffbot?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 15.1% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed Diffbot.

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/diffbot), 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 Diffbot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

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

MLA

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

Chicago

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

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026diffbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {Diffbot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/diffbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

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