What is ICC-Crawler?
ICC-Crawler is NICT's research crawler that automatically collects web pages from the Internet for academic research at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when ICC-Crawler visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | ICC-Crawler/3.0 (Mozilla-compatible; ; https://ucri.nict.go.jp/en/icccrawler.html) |
| Operated By | NICT |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Automated crawl |
| Used for AI Model Training | Yes |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
Why Is ICC-Crawler Visiting My Website?
Your content matched the criteria NICT set for a training dataset. ICC-Crawler typically discovers pages through external links, sitemaps, and seed lists rather than because someone selected your site individually.
Should I Block ICC-Crawler?
Block ICC-Crawler if you want more control over whether your work is used for AI training. Allowing it may increase the chance that your brand appears in AI-generated answers, but either choice leaves traditional search rankings unchanged. For context, 13% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for ICC-Crawler.
How Do I Block ICC-Crawler Using Robots.txt?
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block ICC-Crawler from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI data scrapers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: ICC-Crawler # https://knownagents.com/agents/icc-crawler
Disallow: /Insights for ICC-Crawler
As of October 29, 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 ICC-Crawler?
ICC-Crawler tends to make broad, high-volume sweeps across many pages. Timing is unpredictable: traffic may remain heavy throughout a collection pass, then stop entirely.
Does ICC-Crawler Follow Robots.txt Rules?
ICC-Crawler 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 ICC-Crawler respects it.
Is ICC-Crawler Used for AI Model Training?
Yes. ICC-Crawler collects web content for use in AI training datasets. Blocking it limits future collection but cannot remove content that was collected previously.
Does Blocking ICC-Crawler Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. Blocking ICC-Crawler limits collection for AI training rather than controlling a live AI search index or citation system.
Does ICC-Crawler Access Private Content?
Not through legitimate access. ICC-Crawler primarily targets public content, but some training-data scrapers also attempt to collect gated or paywalled pages. If content loads without authentication, assume it can be collected.
How Can I Verify a Request From ICC-Crawler?
Agent Analytics tracks ICC-Crawler visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "ICC-Crawler". Look for high page counts, short gaps between requests, and deep traversal through linked content. Because ICC-Crawler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.