Diffbot

Operator

Diffbot

Type

AI Data Scraper

Official page

diffbot.com

robots.txt token

Diffbot

Follows robots.txt

Partly, according to Diffbot.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Crawls the web for Diffbot's Knowledge Graph and web search. Diffbot says it isn't used for AI training.

General, proactive web crawling for building a general search engine. This allows websites to be discovered and cited from the Diffbot Knowledge Graph and web search services in response to keyword queries. It is not used for AI training.

Diffbot

User agent

Requests from Diffbot carry user agents like these:

Snap/1.0 (+https://www.diffbot.com/dev/docs/crawl/)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729; Diffbot/0.1; +http://www.diffbot.com)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

.+diffbot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Diffbot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

To whitelist Diffbot for a site, specify the appropriate Diffbot user-agents in the site’s robots.txt.

Diffbot

By default Diffbot's web crawls adhere to a site’s robots.txt instructions, including the disallow and crawl-delay directives. In specific cases — typically because of a partnership or agreement you have with the site to be crawled — the robots.txt instruction can be ignored/overridden.

Diffbot

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

Diffbot customers running Crawlbot or Extract set their own crawl settings and can set a custom user agent. A separate Diffbot-User agent acts on behalf of a human user.

When users use Extract or Crawlbot APIs, they are defining their own crawl parameters using hosted software.

Diffbot

How Vireo counts Diffbot

Vireo keeps requests from Diffbot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Diffbot's user agents.

Sources

• Diffbot: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Diffbot information page (docs.diffbot.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)