What is Diffbot?

It depends on which uses you want to support. Diffbot may supply your content to enterprises, including AI companies, or use it in consumer-facing products. Those uses can include AI training, search, and retrieval. Allowing it may expand your visibility across those products and services, while blocking it limits that reach without affecting traditional search rankings. For context, 19% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Diffbot.

Yes. Diffbot is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Diffbot respects it.

No special access. Diffbot can reach public pages, and some providers use proxy networks that can bypass rate limits or geographic restrictions. Protect sensitive content with authentication rather than relying on those softer barriers.

Agent Analytics tracks Diffbot visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Diffbot". Traffic may range from long crawl sequences across your site to isolated requests for specific pages, depending on whether it is collecting, indexing, or fetching content on demand. Because Diffbot does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.

One of Diffbot's customers may have requested data from your site, or your pages may be part of Diffbot's standing index. A single fetch can support multiple downstream applications.