What is Diffbot?
Diffbot is a web crawler that extracts and structures website content using AI-powered visual understanding, providing knowledge graph data for applications like market intelligence, e-commerce, and AI model training. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Diffbot |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 8, 2026 |
Category
Expected Behavior
Diffbot crawls systematically and at volume, because it feeds an index that many AI customers query. Expect recurring visits that cover large parts of your site rather than single pages. Bursts often trace back to a customer request on its end rather than anything on yours.
Diffbot's User Agent
| User Agent | Diffbot/1.0 |
How To Block Diffbot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Diffbot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI data providers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Diffbot # https://knownagents.com/agents/diffbot
Disallow: /Diffbot Global Insights
As of July 8, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
13% of top websites block Diffbot in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Data Provider Traffic
0.4% of all web traffic came from AI data providers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by Diffbot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Diffbot?
Decide how you feel about redistribution. A single crawl from Diffbot can supply your content to many AI companies for training, search, and retrieval, so allowing it spreads your content across products you have no relationship with. Blocking it costs some AI visibility and nothing in traditional search. For comparison, 13% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for Diffbot.
Does Diffbot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. Diffbot is expected to honor robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms Diffbot actually honors it.
Does Diffbot Access Private Content?
Diffbot targets public pages, but at industrial scale. Some providers route requests through large proxy networks that sidestep rate limits and geographic blocks. Content you want kept out of AI systems is safer behind real authentication than behind soft barriers.
Why Is Diffbot Visiting My Website?
One of Diffbot's customers requested data your site contains, or your pages are part of Diffbot's standing index. A single fetch can end up serving many downstream AI applications.
How Can I Tell if Diffbot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Diffbot visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "Diffbot". Look for systematic crawling that returns on a schedule. Keep in mind that Diffbot doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.