Checks / AI crawler access
robots.txt keeps CCBot out of your home page and most of the site
CCBot collects training data and may read only the paths robots.txt allows for it. This is a choice: most of your pages stay out of future model training, not out of AI search.
robots_partial_ccbot · AI crawler access · Notice
What triggers it
robots.txt does not let CCBot fetch your home page, but leaves some other paths open for it; the finding names the first three.
What to change
Remove the Disallow: / rule for CCBot in robots.txt, or add Allow rules for the other paths you want read.
Example
Lines that allow CCBot in robots.txt:
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /How to confirm the fix
- Open https://example.com/robots.txt: the group that names CCBot (or the * group, if none does) leaves most of the site open, the home page included
- Run a new crawl: the AI crawler table no longer reports CCBot as mostly blocked
About CCBot
CCBot is the crawler of Common Crawl, a non-profit that maintains an open repository of web crawl data anyone can access and analyze. Common Crawl says User-agent: CCBot with Disallow: / stops it crawling a site. It also warns that other crawlers falsely identify themselves as CCBot, so verify requests.
CCBot builds a public crawl archive that others can use, while GPTBot collects content for OpenAI's own purposes.
Common Crawl says CCBot runs on dedicated IP address ranges with reverse DNS (not for IPv6), so a logged request can be checked with a reverse lookup that resolves to a crawl.commoncrawl.org hostname; the ranges are also published as JSON at https://index.commoncrawl.org/ccbot.json.
Job: Open web crawl archive. Follows robots.txt: Yes, via a robots.txt rule for CCBot.
CCBot: operator, user-agent string and address list
How common it is
We have not measured how common this is on a sample of sites. Counts appear here when a study covers it.
About this check
| Check ID | robots_partial_ccbot |
|---|---|
| Report section | AI crawler access |
| Severity | Notice |
| How it is decided | Measured: read directly from the page or the server's response. |
| Added | Before 19 Oct 2026 (versions 1 and 2), or a site-wide check with no version date yet |
| Status | Measured in every report |
| Report gives the code | Yes, one block for the site |
Settings by platform
For robots.txt, where the setting lives differs by platform. Our guides cover 13 of them: AI crawler settings by platform.
Related checks
- robots.txt blocks Google-Extended
- robots.txt blocks GPTBot
- robots.txt keeps ClaudeBot out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt keeps Google-Extended out of your home page and most of the site
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