CCBot

What CCBot does

CCBot builds Common Crawl's freely downloadable monthly snapshots of the public web. Common Crawl itself is a nonprofit archive, but its datasets have been used to train many well-known AI models - filtered derivatives of its snapshots are documented ingredients in the training data behind several major model families - which makes CCBot a de facto pipeline into AI training. Because the snapshots are public, anyone can download what CCBot collected, including model builders who never crawl your site themselves.

Why it visits your site

It aims to archive a representative sample of the public web, so almost any indexable site gets crawled eventually.

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?

Blocking CCBot removes your future content from one of the most widely used public training datasets - a single block that reaches many downstream models, including ones that don't operate a crawler of their own. That leverage is exactly why it became one of the most-blocked tokens on large publisher sites. The cost is also broad: researchers, academics, and archives use Common Crawl for legitimate non-AI purposes, and past snapshots already exist - a block only governs the future.

Block via robots.txt

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

User-agent: CCBot
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 CCBot traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every CCBot 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 CCBot doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to CCBot 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.