What is CCBot? Common Crawl's AI crawler
CCBot is the crawler of Common Crawl, a non-profit that publishes an open archive of the web. That archive is widely used as a source of AI training data.
94 of the 389 major websites we measure block CCBot in robots.txt (24%), making it number 1 of the 30 AI crawlers we track for how often it is blocked. 101 of those sites name it directly in their robots.txt; the rest are covered by a wildcard rule.
Key facts
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Operator | Common Crawl |
| Used for | The Common Crawl dataset |
| Type | Model training. Collects content that may be used to train AI models. Blocking it does not usually remove a site from AI search. |
| robots.txt token | CCBot |
| Operator's documentation | Read it here |
What blocking CCBot does
Blocking it keeps future crawls of a site out of the archive. It does not remove anything already in earlier archives.
How to allow or block CCBot
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. It is a stated preference that well-behaved crawlers read, not an enforcement mechanism.
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
User-agent: CCBot Allow: /
CCBot user agent string
The string Common Crawl documents. Version numbers can change, so match on the name.
CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
How to verify a request is really CCBot
Anyone can put a crawler's name in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Common Crawl says CCBot runs on dedicated IP ranges whose reverse DNS names end in crawl.commoncrawl.org (not yet over IPv6). It also warns that other crawlers falsely identify themselves as CCBot.
How to whitelist CCBot in a firewall or CDN
robots.txt only states a preference. A firewall, CDN or bot protection service can still refuse the request, and the crawler then gets an error even though robots.txt allows it.
- Check that no group in your robots.txt blocks it, using the rule above.
- Add an allow rule in your firewall or CDN that matches the name in the user agent. Keep the rule narrow, because anyone can copy a name.
- Check your server logs for a 200 response from CCBot afterwards.
On Cloudflare, also check AI Crawler and Agent access policies, which can block search, agent and training traffic across a site.
Why CCBot gets a 403 or 405 error
A 403 means the server refused the request, which usually points to a firewall or bot rule. A 405 means the server refused the request's method, so check any rule that only permits certain methods. A crawler that obeys robots.txt won't request a page it is told to avoid, so an error in your logs points to your server's configuration. To stop it deliberately at the server, this nginx rule returns a 403:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "CCBot") {
return 403;
}Which sites recently changed their rules for CCBot?
| Date first seen | Site | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2 November 2026 | fool.com | Started blocking |
| 19 October 2026 | aliexpress.com | Started blocking |
| 31 August 2026 | fastcompany.com | Started blocking |
| 31 August 2026 | inc.com | Started blocking |
See the full change log.
Who blocks CCBot, by sector
| Sector | Sites measured | Blocking | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| News publishers | 44 | 35 | 80% |
| Technology media | 25 | 16 | 64% |
| Social and media platforms | 28 | 10 | 36% |
| Finance and business media | 29 | 10 | 34% |
| Health publishers | 16 | 5 | 31% |
| E-commerce and retail | 19 | 4 | 21% |
| Reference and research | 25 | 5 | 20% |
| Travel | 19 | 3 | 16% |
| Developer references | 34 | 2 | 6% |
| SaaS platforms | 54 | 3 | 6% |
| Government and institutions | 19 | 1 | 5% |
| AI companies | 28 | 0 | 0% |
| Hosting and infrastructure | 23 | 0 | 0% |
| SEO and marketing tools | 26 | 0 | 0% |
Sites blocking CCBot
abcnews.go.com, academia.edu, aliexpress.com, amazon.com, apnews.com, arstechnica.com, asahi.com, axios.com, barrons.com, bbc.co.uk, behance.net, bleepingcomputer.com, bloomberg.com, businessinsider.com, buzzfeednews.com, calendly.com, canva.com, cnbc.com, cnn.com, cntraveler.com, corriere.it, dictionary.com, drugs.com, dw.com, ebay.com, economist.com, elpais.com, fastcompany.com, figma.com, flickr.com, fool.com, forbes.com, fortune.com, france24.com, ft.com, geeksforgeeks.org, gizmodo.com, globeandmail.com, goodreads.com, hackernoon.com, healthline.com, howtogeek.com, huffpost.com, imdb.com, inc.com, instacart.com, investopedia.com, lemonde.fr, lifehacker.com, makeuseof.com, marketwatch.com, mashable.com, medicalnewstoday.com, metacritic.com, nature.com, nbcnews.com, netflix.com, newsweek.com, newyorker.com, nytimes.com, and 34 more in the full dataset.
Sites that allow CCBot by name
amplitude.com, bestbuy.com, cloudflare.com, css-tricks.com, deel.com, delta.com, disneyplus.com, frase.io, hulu.com, jasper.ai, jstor.org, omio.com, redis.io, render.com, sitepoint.com, soundcloud.com, squarespace.com, stability.ai, ulta.com.
See all 30 AI crawlers, the rule change log or the full study. Being reachable is only the first step: how AI search engines choose what to cite covers the rest.
Cite this data
You are welcome to quote or republish these figures. Please credit IndexHalo with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0). All our datasets are on the data page.
IndexHalo. "CCBot block rate across major websites." Measured 3 November 2026. https://www.indexhalo.com/ai-crawlers/ccbot/
<a href="https://www.indexhalo.com/ai-crawlers/ccbot/">CCBot block rate across major websites, IndexHalo</a>