TerraCotta

Operator

Ceramic, Inc.

Type

AI Data Scraper

Official page

github.com

robots.txt token

Terra Cotta, TerraCotta

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Terra Cotta is Ceramic's web crawler that indexes public content to power their web-scale search API for AI and LLMs.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: AI Data Providers

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from TerraCotta carry a user agent like this:

TerraCotta https://github.com/CeramicTeam/CeramicTerracotta

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

TerraCotta

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 TerraCotta

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

User-agent: Terra Cotta
User-agent: TerraCotta
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 TerraCotta

Vireo keeps requests from TerraCotta 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 TerraCotta's user agents.

Sources

• TerraCotta information page (github.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)