AI2Bot

What AI2Bot does

AI2Bot explores selected domains for web content that feeds Ai2's open research, including its openly released language models and the Dolma training dataset; an Ai2Bot-Dolma variant also appears in logs. Ai2 publishes a crawling notice with the user agent and a contact route, and notes the identifier can be used to filter or reject its traffic. The notice says nothing about robots.txt behavior, though; community lists report compliance, which is plausible for a research nonprofit but not something Ai2 states itself.

Why it visits your site

Your text is candidate material for open training datasets, and reference-quality writing is exactly what a research corpus wants.

The bigger picture: AI training crawlers

Training crawlers are the most economically lopsided visitors your server has. A search crawler takes your content and pays you back in ranked listings and click-throughs; a training crawler takes the same content to improve a commercial model and, by design, sends nothing in return. The visit itself is the entire transaction. That asymmetry is why training bots - not AI in general - are where most of the blocking debate actually lives, and why the publishing industry's response has split between refusal and negotiation: several large publishers block these crawlers outright, while others have signed licensing deals with the same operators. Both strategies start from the same place - knowing, concretely, how much of your archive is being read and by whom.

The norms here are young and still hardening. The better operators now publish user agents, IP ranges, and opt-out tokens, and honor robots.txt; others publish nothing and, by widely credited reports, crawl through disallow rules. Treat each crawler on its record rather than assuming the category behaves uniformly - and remember that a robots.txt line only ever governs the polite end of the spectrum.

Should you block it?

The usual training-crawler trade applies, with a wrinkle: Ai2's models and datasets are released openly for research, which some site owners find easier to live with than commercial training. If your policy is no training crawls at all, block the AI2Bot token; if you make exceptions, an academic nonprofit is a reasonable place to make one.

Block via robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask AI2Bot to stay away:

User-agent: AI2Bot
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.

How to see AI2Bot traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every AI2Bot request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because AI2Bot doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to AI2Bot and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.