DeepSeekBot

What is DeepSeekBot?

DeepSeek training crawler. Reported to ignore robots.txt in some deployments. Training-data crawlers collect publicly available pages to build future AI models. Allowing one means your content can shape how models write and reason about your topics, and your site may be quoted from model memory. Blocking one keeps future training runs away, though anything already collected typically stays collected.

If you want AI engines to know your brand and quote your pages from memory, this is the crawler that gets you there.

Does DeepSeekBot respect robots.txt?

No — reliably. DeepSeekBot has been reported to ignore robots.txt directives, so a Disallow line may not stop it. If you want this crawler out, enforce the block at the infrastructure level: a user-agent rule in Cloudflare (Security → WAF → custom rule, field User Agent, operator contains, action Block), a WAF rule, or a server-level deny. CrawlCheck's auditor flags robots.txt-blind crawlers with a warning mark for exactly this reason.

How to block DeepSeekBot

A robots.txt Disallow is the right signal to publish, but DeepSeekBot may ignore it. Publish the rule anyway, then enforce at the edge (Cloudflare WAF, Nginx deny, or your host's firewall):

User-agent: DeepSeekBot
Disallow: /

If you monetize content behind a paywall or care about control, allowing broad training crawlers means giving that material away with no attribution loop.

How to allow DeepSeekBot

DeepSeekBot is allowed by default on every site. It only gets blocked if a matching rule exists — most often a global User-agent: * group with Disallow: /. To exempt it while blocking other bots, put an empty Disallow group for it before the global block:

User-agent: DeepSeekBot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /