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 | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
Turnitin periodically fetches complete pages rather than checking metadata alone. Visit frequency typically rises with your site's popularity and update cadence.
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 Statistics for Turnitin
As of August 11, 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 Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
1% of top websites block Turnitin in their robots.txt files.
Overall Archiver Traffic
0.0% 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?
Rarely. Turnitin preserves snapshots of your pages through redesigns, migrations, and broken links. Blocking it prevents future captures but does not remove existing snapshots. To remove those, you must contact the archive directly. For context, 1% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Turnitin.
Does Turnitin Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Turnitin 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 Turnitin respects it.
Does Turnitin Access Private Content?
No. Turnitin archives only what an anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time may remain available in its archive long after you remove it from your site.
Why Is Turnitin Visiting My Website?
Turnitin is preserving your pages as part of a historical record. It returns periodically 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 a page and its embedded assets being fetched again after a long interval. Because Turnitin does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.