Diffbot

What is Diffbot?

Knowledge-graph extraction crawler. 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 Diffbot respect robots.txt?

Yes. Diffbot honors robots.txt directives, including wildcard rules and Allow lines. A Disallow rule for this crawler is respected — but remember robots.txt is a voluntary protocol across the whole industry, not a wall.

How to block Diffbot

Add this group to your robots.txt to deny Diffbot across your whole site:

User-agent: Diffbot
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 Diffbot

Diffbot 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: Diffbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /