Cohere runs it as a user-triggered fetcher, which means it fetches one page at the moment a person asks an assistant to open it. There is no index and no schedule: somebody has pasted your link or asked for your site by name, and is waiting for the answer while the request happens.
What blocking it costs you: Cohere’s grounded generation, which sits behind a large number of enterprise assistants, cannot retrieve you in response to a prompt. A link somebody pasted into an assistant fails while they are watching. They asked for your page by name and got an error.
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
cohere-ai
Operator
Cohere
Category
User-triggered
Full user agent
Not published by Cohere. Match on the token above.
Where an operator has not published the exact string, this page says so rather than
inventing a plausible one. A user agent you can grep your logs for is worth nothing if it is a guess.
Allowing cohere-ai
Paste this into robots.txt at the root of your domain.
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 cohere-ai
User-agent: cohere-ai
Disallow: /
Before you paste that: cohere’s grounded generation, which sits behind a large number of enterprise assistants, cannot retrieve you in response to a prompt. That is the cost, and it is paid silently — no error appears in your logs, no report tells you, and the traffic you lose was traffic you never saw arrive.
How the web actually treats cohere-ai
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
37
13%
Explicitly allowed
201
69%
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
cohere-ai 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.com
The 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 cohere-ai
What is cohere-ai?
cohere-ai is a user-triggered fetcher operated by Cohere: it fetches one page at the moment a person asks an assistant to open it. There is no index and no schedule: somebody has pasted your link or asked for your site by name, and is waiting for the answer while the request happens.
Should I block cohere-ai in robots.txt?
Only if you are willing to pay what it costs. Cohere’s grounded generation, which sits behind a large number of enterprise assistants, cannot retrieve you in response to a prompt. A link somebody pasted into an assistant fails while they are watching. They asked for your page by name and got an error.
What is the cohere-ai user agent string?
Cohere does not publish a full user-agent string for this crawler. The robots.txt product token is cohere-ai, and that is what a rule matches on; matching is case-insensitive.
How do I check whether my site is blocking cohere-ai 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.