CCBot: robots token, verification and how to allow or disallow it
CCBot is an AI crawler operated by Common Crawl Foundation. Its robots.txt token is CCBot, and the vendor documentation we fetched on 2026-09-06 is the source for every statement on this page.
| Robots token | CCBot |
|---|---|
| Vendor | Common Crawl Foundation |
| Purpose | training corpus, public web corpus |
| Documented verification | none published |
| Vendor documentation last verified | 2026-09-06 |
| Share of read domains disallowing it for / | 18.8% of 128 |
| Last verified |
Identity
| Robots token | CCBot |
|---|---|
| Matched as | ccbot |
| Vendor | Common Crawl Foundation |
| Purpose | training corpus, public web corpus |
| Documentation | https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot |
| Documented verification | none published |
Not an answer engine itself: it builds the public corpus that many models train on, which is why site owners treat it as an AI crawler. The exact snippet 'User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /' appears on the vendor page fetched on 2026-09-06.
Allow or disallow it
User-agent: CCBot Allow: /
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
A robots.txt rule is a request that a well behaved crawler honours. It is not an access control, and this page does not tell anyone what to choose.
Questions
Does CCBot obey robots.txt?
The vendor documentation at https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot states that CCBot respects robots.txt. We fetched that page and it answered our checker on 2026-09-06. This records what the vendor documents, not what any individual request did.
How do I allow CCBot in robots.txt?
Add this group to the robots.txt at the root of the host: User-agent: CCBot Allow: /. The token is matched case insensitively as a substring of the user agent by RFC 9309, and the longest matching rule wins.
How do I disallow CCBot in robots.txt?
Add this group to the robots.txt at the root of the host: User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /. A robots.txt rule is a request that a well behaved crawler honours; it is not an access control.
How do I verify a request really came from CCBot?
We have not found a documented verification method for CCBot: the vendor publishes neither an IP range file nor a reverse DNS convention that we could fetch. Without one, a user agent string is not evidence of origin.
What we measure
Of the 128 seeded domains whose robots.txt we have read, 24 disallow CCBot for / and 104 allow it, which is 18.8% disallowed, week 2026-W37. Counts only: no domain is named.
The weekly AI crawler access index
Sources
| Source | Type | HTTP | Verified | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot | vendor | 200 | 2026-09-06 | 11 occurrences of CCBot in the fetched body |
Free data
Check a domain against every token
AEO Watch is an independent, factual monitor. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or speaking for any crawler vendor. Every statement is an observation with the date it was made and the raw evidence behind it: a robots.txt line, an HTTP status code, a header. There are no scores, no grades and no verdicts here, and nothing on this page is advice. A site opts out at any time and the opt out is honoured automatically and permanently.