What is Diffbot?

It depends on how you feel about redistribution. A crawl from Diffbot can supply your content to multiple AI companies for training, search, or retrieval. Allowing it may expand your visibility across third-party AI products, while blocking it limits that reach without affecting traditional search rankings. For context, 14% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Diffbot.

Yes. Diffbot is expected to follow robots.txt directives, 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.

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 AI applications.

Agent Analytics tracks Diffbot 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 "Diffbot". Look for long sequences of requests spanning several unrelated sections of your site. Because Diffbot does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.