TikTokSpider

Operator

TikTok Inc.

Type

Search bot

Official page

tiktok.com

robots.txt token

TikTokSpider

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

Downloads data to train LLMS, as per Bytespider.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: LLM training.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from TikTokSpider carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; TikTokSpider; ttspider-feedback@tiktok.com)

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

TikTokSpider

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 TikTokSpider

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: TikTokSpider
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 TikTokSpider

Vireo keeps requests from TikTokSpider out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Search engines, 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 TikTokSpider's user agents.

Sources

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