ICC-Crawler

Operator

NICT

Type

Crawler

Official page

nict.go.jp

robots.txt token

ICC-Crawler

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Use the collected data for artificial intelligence technologies; provide data to third parties, including commercial companies; those companies can use the data for their own business.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Scrapes data to train and support AI technologies.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from ICC-Crawler carry a user agent like this:

ICC-Crawler/2.0 (Mozilla-compatible; ; http://www.nict.go.jp/en/univ-com/plan/crawl.html)

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

ICC-Crawler

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 ICC-Crawler

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: ICC-Crawler
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.

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.

How Vireo counts ICC-Crawler

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

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over ICC-Crawler's user agents.

Sources

• ICC-Crawler information page (nict.go.jp)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)