What is CCBot?
CCBot is a training crawler operated by Common Crawl: it collects text to train a model on. It sends nobody to your site, now or later, and it is the only category on this list where that is true.
Training crawler
Should you block CCBot?
CCBot is operated by Common Crawl. Collects content for model training. Blocking it is a legitimate business choice with no traffic cost.
What CCBot is
Common Crawl runs it as a training crawler, which means it collects text to train a model on. It sends nobody to your site, now or later, and it is the only category on this list where that is true.
What blocking it costs you: Excluded from Common Crawl, the base corpus behind most open models. Nothing, in traffic terms. This is the one group where blocking has a real argument behind it and no visitor cost.
The user agent, and the token a rule matches on
These are two different strings and confusing them is why a rule that looks right does nothing.
A robots.txt rule matches on the product token, case-insensitively, and
ignores the rest of the user-agent header entirely.
| robots.txt token | CCBot |
|---|---|
| Operator | Common Crawl |
| Category | Training crawler |
| Full user agent | CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/) |
Allowing CCBot
Paste this into robots.txt at the root of your domain.
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://axray.online/sitemap.xml
An empty Disallow: and Allow: / mean the same thing to a crawler. What does
not mean the same thing is having no rule at all: absence is permission by default, but it is
permission nobody wrote down, and it survives only until somebody adds a blanket
User-agent: * block without thinking about this crawler.
Blocking CCBot
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /This one is a fair decision to make. A training crawler sends you no visitors, so blocking it costs you nothing in traffic and is a position you are entitled to take. Be clear about what it achieves: robots.txt is honoured by operators who choose to honour it, and does nothing about your text reaching a model through a third-party copy, a screenshot, or somebody pasting it into a chat window.
How the web actually treats CCBot
Measured on 2026-09-06, by reading the robots.txt of
292 public websites and resolving each one against this crawler specifically.
| Verdict | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Blocked | 55 | 19% |
| Explicitly allowed | 183 | 63% |
| No rule either way | 54 | 18% |
No site is named, here or anywhere else on this domain. The count is the useful part; a league table of businesses that never asked to be measured is not.
The row worth reading twice is the last one. 54 of 292 sites have written no rule about
CCBot at all, which means their position on it is an accident rather than a decision — whatever
their User-agent: * block happens to say.
Checking what your site does right now
Reading your own robots.txt is not the same as knowing what a crawler concludes from it.
Precedence between a User-agent: * group and a named one, the longest-match rule between
overlapping paths, and a token you spelled slightly wrong all produce a file that looks correct and
behaves otherwise.
npx axray-cli your-site.comThe scan resolves your file against all 54 crawlers on this list individually and reports which ones are allowed, blocked, or covered by nothing. It is free, needs no account, and installs nothing.
Questions people ask about CCBot
Should I block CCBot in robots.txt?
Blocking CCBot costs you no visitors, because it collects content for model training rather than sending anyone to your site. That makes it the one group where the decision is genuinely yours to make on principle. What it does not do is keep your content out of models — it applies only to operators who read robots.txt, and does nothing about a copy reached through somebody else.
What is the CCBot user agent string?
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/) — and the robots.txt product token, which is what a rule actually matches on, is CCBot.
How do I check whether my site is blocking CCBot right now?
Scan your site with AXRAY. It resolves your robots.txt against 54 named AI crawlers individually rather than reporting one verdict for all of them, so it will tell you whether this specific crawler is allowed, blocked, or covered by no rule at all. It is free and needs no account.
Other training crawlers
GPTBot— OpenAIClaudeBot— AnthropicGoogle-Extended— GoogleApplebot-Extended— Applemeta-externalagent— MetaBytespider— ByteDanceDeepSeekBot— DeepSeekAI2Bot— Ai2
The full reference: all 54 AI crawlers, and who blocks each one.
See which of these 54 crawlers your own site is blocking, and what each one costs you. One scan, no account.