Cohere-AI

What Cohere-AI does

Cohere builds large language models for enterprise customers, and two tokens tied to its data collection circulate in community blocklists: the older cohere-ai and the more specific cohere-training-data-crawler, which has been observed in logs downloading training data for Cohere's models. Cohere itself publishes no crawler documentation - no user agent page, no IP ranges, no robots.txt guidance - so everything known about its crawling comes from third-party observation rather than from the operator.

Why it visits your site

Text for training corpora. When it visits, it reads like any other bulk training crawler: broadly, and without sending anything back.

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?

With no documentation and no stated robots.txt policy, there is little reason to extend the benefit of the doubt. Adding both tokens to robots.txt costs nothing, and most published AI blocklists already include them. Just don't expect robots.txt alone to settle the matter, since compliance is unverified in either direction.

Block via robots.txt

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

User-agent: cohere-training-data-crawler
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 Cohere-AI traffic on your site

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

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Cohere-AI 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.