What is Turnitin?
Turnitin crawler gathers web content to build a comprehensive database for plagiarism detection services, comparing student papers against internet content for academic integrity. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Turnitin |
| 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
Turnitin returns on a cadence to capture full snapshots of your pages for the historical record. Expect complete page fetches rather than metadata checks, at a frequency that rises with your site's popularity and how often your content changes.
Turnitin's User Agent
| User Agent | Turnitin (https://bit.ly/2UvnfoQ) |
How To Block Turnitin With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Turnitin from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all archivers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Turnitin # https://knownagents.com/agents/turnitin
Disallow: /Global Insights for Turnitin
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
1% of top websites block Turnitin in their robots.txt files.
Overall Archiver Traffic
0.1% of all web traffic came from archivers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by Turnitin.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Turnitin?
Almost never. Turnitin preserves snapshots of your pages so the record survives redesigns, migrations, and dead links. Blocking only stops new captures. Snapshots that already exist stay public until you ask the archive itself to remove them. For comparison, 1% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for Turnitin.
Does Turnitin Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Turnitin 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 Turnitin actually follows it.
Does Turnitin Access Private Content?
It archives only what any anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time can stay retrievable in Turnitin's archive long after you take it down.
Why Is Turnitin Visiting My Website?
Turnitin is preserving your pages as part of the historical record. Visits recur on a schedule so the archive can capture how your content changes over time.
How Can I Tell if Turnitin Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Turnitin 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 "Turnitin". Look for periodic full page captures that recur on a schedule. Keep in mind that Turnitin 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.