# Diffbot **Category:** Training | **Operated by:** Diffbot Diffbot's crawler reads pages and extracts structured facts into a commercial Knowledge Graph. --- ## At a glance | Property | Value | |---|---| | Operator | Diffbot | | Category | Training | | User-Agent token | `Diffbot` | | robots.txt token | `Diffbot` | | Respects robots.txt | Documented as compliant | **Respects robots.txt note:** Diffbot honours `Disallow` by default, but its documentation notes the setting can be overridden in specific cases — typically where its customer has a partnership or agreement with the site being crawled. **Operator docs:** www.diffbot.com --- ## What Diffbot does Diffbot turns pages into entities and relationships — companies, people, products, articles — and sells access to the resulting graph. Diffbot states this general crawling is not used for AI model training; a separate `Diffbot-User` token covers fetches made on behalf of a human user of its products. Its customers include sales, research and AI teams that want structured data rather than raw text. --- ## Should you block Diffbot? Blocking keeps your data out of a commercial dataset that gets resold. Nothing a visitor can see changes, because there is no consumer answer engine on the other side. Plenty of businesses take the opposite view and want to be present and accurately represented in that graph. --- ## How to block Diffbot Add the rule below to the `robots.txt` file at the root of your domain (`yourdomain.com/robots.txt`). Use the `Diffbot` token rather than the raw User-Agent string, and repeat the rule on every subdomain you want covered. **Block Diffbot:** ``` User-agent: Diffbot Disallow: / ``` **Allow Diffbot explicitly:** ``` User-agent: Diffbot Allow: / ``` > **Note:** `robots.txt` is a request, not a lock — it works because well-behaved crawlers choose to read it. It also isn't retroactive: anything already fetched stays fetched. If you need a hard stop, block at your firewall or CDN as well. --- ## How MetaPilot handles Diffbot MetaPilot detects Diffbot in your edge logs, so you see its real hits on your real pages rather than a guess: how often it visits, which URLs it takes, and how that trend moves week to week. From the same screen you flip Diffbot between allow and deny with one click — MetaPilot rewrites only its own managed section of your `robots.txt` and serves it at the edge, so the change is live on the crawler's next visit with no deploy and no touching your own rules. --- ## FAQ **What is Diffbot?** Diffbot's crawler reads pages and extracts structured facts into a commercial Knowledge Graph. It turns pages into entities and relationships — companies, people, products, articles — and sells access to the resulting graph. Diffbot states this general crawling is not used for AI model training. Its customers include sales, research and AI teams that want structured data rather than raw text. **Does Diffbot respect robots.txt?** Yes — Diffbot documents that it honours `robots.txt`. A `Disallow` for the `Diffbot` token is respected by default, but the setting can be overridden in specific cases — typically where its customer has a partnership or agreement with the site being crawled. **How do I block Diffbot?** Add these two lines to the `robots.txt` file at the root of your domain: `User-agent: Diffbot` `Disallow: /` Use the `Diffbot` token, not the raw User-Agent string, and repeat the rule on every subdomain you want covered. **Will blocking Diffbot hurt my traffic?** Blocking keeps your data out of a commercial dataset that gets resold. Nothing a visitor can see changes, because there is no consumer answer engine on the other side. --- ## Related crawlers - **ClaudeBot** (Anthropic) — Training: Anthropic's bulk crawler, collecting public web content that may be used to develop and train Claude. - **Applebot-Extended** (Apple) — Training: Apple's AI opt-out token, telling Apple not to use content Applebot already crawled to train its foundation models. - **Bytespider** (ByteDance) — Training: ByteDance's web crawler, gathering content to train the large language models behind its products. - **CCBot / Common Crawl** (Common Crawl) — Training: The crawler behind Common Crawl, the free public web archive that a great many AI models are trained on.