What is ds9?
ds9 is operated by Copyright Clearance Center and crawls websites to gather information about published content for copyright licensing and rights management purposes. This bot helps identify and track copyrighted materials across the web to facilitate proper licensing agreements between content owners and users. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Copyright Clearance Center |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 31, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
ds9 visits with a specific set of goals. Expect focused, repeated requests to the pages its clients monitor, like pricing, product listings, and announcements, on schedules ranging from hourly to weekly. Sites outside a client's watchlist may never see it at all.
ds9's User Agent
| User Agent | ds9 2.000.7sm(+https://data.dss.sps.copyright.com/docs/user_agent.html) |
How To Block ds9 With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block ds9 from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all intelligence gatherers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: ds9 # https://knownagents.com/agents/ds9
Disallow: /Global Insights for ds9
As of July 31, 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
0% of top websites block ds9 in their robots.txt files.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
4.5% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by ds9.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block ds9?
Decide who benefits. ds9 collects pricing, product, and brand data for its operator's clients, and those clients can include your competitors. Allow it if visibility in market research matters to you. Block it if you would rather not hand competitors structured data about your business. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for ds9 right now.
Does ds9 Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. ds9 is expected to follow 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 ds9 actually follows it.
Does ds9 Access Private Content?
Public business information is the target. Pricing pages, product listings, and announcements are what its clients pay for. ds9 has no special access, but assume everything you publish openly gets collected.
Why Is ds9 Visiting My Website?
A client of Copyright Clearance Center is monitoring your market, your brand, or you specifically. Expect ds9's visits to concentrate on pages with business value, like pricing and product pages.
How Can I Tell if ds9 Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks ds9 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 "ds9". Look for repeated visits to pricing, product, and news pages. Keep in mind that ds9 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.