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. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Diffbot visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Diffbot-User/1.0; +https://www.diffbot.com) |
| Operated By | Diffbot |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Customer request or automated indexing |
| Used for AI Model Training | Possibly |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Possibly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
Why Is Diffbot Visiting My Website?
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.
Should I Block 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, 21% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Diffbot.
How Do I Block Diffbot Using Robots.txt?
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Diffbot from accessing your 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: /Insights for Diffbot
As of October 30, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Diffbot?
Diffbot supports several kinds of automated activity, so its traffic pattern depends on the task. It may perform broad crawls to collect content or build an index, make targeted requests for specific pages, or shift between these behaviors as demand changes.
Does Diffbot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Diffbot is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step if you want to block it. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Diffbot respects it.
Is Diffbot Used for AI Model Training?
Possibly. Diffbot supplies data to other organizations, and its customers may use that data for AI training, search, retrieval, or other purposes.
Does Blocking Diffbot Affect AI Search or Citations?
Possibly. Blocking Diffbot can reduce your visibility in downstream AI products that depend on its data, including search or retrieval products operated by its customers.
Does Diffbot Access Private Content?
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.
How Can I Verify a Request From Diffbot?
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.