AI crawlers · Common Crawl
Is your site blocking CCBot?
CCBot is Common Crawl's crawler for its open web archive, which many AI companies use for training. Check your site now: we read your robots.txt exactly as CCBot must, ask your server as each AI crawler, and look at your product pages.
Does blocking it hurt?
Model training Blocking CCBot only opts your content out of Common Crawl's open web archive, which many AI companies use for training. It doesn't stop AI search and answer assistants from reading your shop. Whether to allow training is your choice, not a fault.
In our research, 4% of 2,159 online shops block CCBot in robots.txt. See the research.
Allow or block it in robots.txt
Common Crawl says CCBot follows robots.txt, so the lines below decide whether it reads your shop.
To let it in (add to your robots.txt, at yourshop.com/robots.txt):
User-agent: CCBot Allow: /
To keep it out:
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
A more specific group wins: if your robots.txt also has a group for CCBot, that group decides, not the “User-agent: *” rules. Our check reads it the same way (RFC 9309).
Other places it gets blocked
- Cloudflare. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new sites since July 2025, and it can also write your robots.txt for you. If your site uses Cloudflare, check its AI crawler settings first (MIT Technology Review).
- Security plugins and firewalls. WordPress security plugins and host firewalls sometimes refuse crawlers they don’t recognise, even when robots.txt allows them. Our check asks your server as each crawler and shows any refusal.
Where this comes from
Common Crawl’s own documentation: commoncrawl.org. Common Crawl's public crawler; its archive is a common training source.
We check 18 AI crawlers in one go. See them all · How the check works