CCBot
Common Crawl · Training crawlers · User agent + IP range
About this crawler
Common Crawl's crawler, which builds an open web dataset that many AI models are trained on.
Usually means: Public content is being collected that may end up in model training data or large web datasets.
User agent
CCBot
MetricRaven matches this token anywhere in the request's user agent, ignoring case. Operators add version numbers and browser text around it, for example "CCBot/1.0".
IP verification
Verified when the user agent and the IP range both match
1User agent
The request's user agent contains
CCBot.2Request IP
Your server-side tracker sends the IP that made the request.
3Range check
The IP is compared with the ranges Common Crawl publishes, refreshed twice a day.
Range sources
CCBot IP ranges
Control it in robots.txt
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /private/
Well-behaved crawlers re-read robots.txt within a day or so.
Questions
- What is CCBot?
- Common Crawl's crawler, which builds an open web dataset that many AI models are trained on. MetricRaven groups it under Training crawlers: crawlers collecting public pages that may be used to train AI models.
- How do I verify that a request really comes from CCBot?
- Check both the user agent and the IP. Requests from CCBot contain "CCBot" in the user agent and come from the IP ranges Common Crawl publishes (https://index.commoncrawl.org/ccbot.json). A request with the name but another IP is likely spoofed.
- How do I block or allow CCBot?
- Add a robots.txt group for "CCBot" with the paths to allow or disallow. Fetchers that act for a user may ignore robots.txt; block those at your server or firewall instead.
- How can I see when CCBot visits my website?
- Most crawlers never run JavaScript, so browser analytics miss them. MetricRaven's @metricraven/ai-crawl package reports crawler requests from your server, verifies their IPs against published ranges, and shows which pages each crawler reads.
See when AI assistants and crawlers read your site
Add one line to your server and MetricRaven shows which assistants, search engines and training crawlers request your pages, which ones are IP-verified, and the URLs they expected to find, including 404s.