Diffbot
Diffbot · Training crawlers · User agent only
About this crawler
Crawls pages to extract structured data for Diffbot's Knowledge Graph and APIs.
Usually means: Public content is being collected that may end up in model training data or large web datasets.
User agent
Diffbot
MetricRaven matches this token anywhere in the request's user agent, ignoring case. Operators add version numbers and browser text around it, for example "Diffbot/1.0".
IP verification
Diffbot publishes no IP ranges for Diffbot, so requests are identified by user agent only and recorded as unverified. Anyone can send this user agent.
Control it in robots.txt
User-agent: Diffbot Disallow: /private/
Well-behaved crawlers re-read robots.txt within a day or so.
Questions
- What is Diffbot?
- Crawls pages to extract structured data for Diffbot's Knowledge Graph and APIs. 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 Diffbot?
- Diffbot publishes no IP ranges for Diffbot, so only the user agent identifies it. Anyone can send that string, so treat it as a claim.
- How do I block or allow Diffbot?
- Add a robots.txt group for "Diffbot" 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 Diffbot 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.