Understanding CCBot: Common Crawl's Web Crawler for AI Data

What CCBot Actually Does

CCBot is the web crawler that powers Common Crawl, a nonprofit organization that creates massive AI training datasets from the web. As a web scraping bot, CCBot visits billions of web pages each month, gathering text, images, and metadata. This data contributes to the Common Crawl dataset, one of the largest publicly available web archives. Major AI companies leverage this dataset for AI model training and development. The initiative aims to make web data accessible to everyone, offering a valuable resource for developers and researchers who lack the resources to conduct their own extensive web crawling. The web crawler operates continuously, releasing new machine learning datasets every few months, each potentially petabytes in size, with snapshots from specific time frames.

Why Common Crawl Exists

Before Common Crawl’s inception in 2011, only resource-rich companies could build large web datasets. Companies like Google and Microsoft had the infrastructure to crawl and store billions of pages, leaving smaller companies and researchers at a disadvantage. Common Crawl was established to level the playing field, making its datasets freely available for those with the technical capability to process them. Common Crawl As AI and machine learning advanced, the need for extensive text data became crucial. Modern AI training datasets require vast amounts of information, making Common Crawl essential for breakthroughs that were previously beyond the reach of smaller teams. The organization maintains an open repository, supporting research, education, and innovation across the tech industry. Operating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Common Crawl relies on donations and grants to cover infrastructure costs.

CCBot Web Crawling Process:

How AI Companies Use Common Crawl

The Common Crawl dataset is a cornerstone of AI data collection. Companies developing large language models, like GPT-3 and GPT-4, require billions of human text examples. OpenAI GPT-3 OpenAI GPT-4 Common Crawl provides these in multiple languages. Major AI labs such as OpenAI, Meta, and Alphabet have used Common Crawl in their model training. The data aids in learning language grammar, facts, reasoning patterns, and more. However, companies do not use the raw crawl data directly. They filter and clean it to remove low-quality pages and duplicates. This processing is complex and resource-intensive, but it begins with the foundational web data from Common Crawl.

Technical Details About CCBot

CCBot identifies itself with the user agent string CCBot/2.0 when visiting websites. Website owners can inspect their server logs to check for visits from CCBot. This web scraping bot respects robots.txt files, allowing site owners to block it if desired. By adding “User-agent: CCBot” followed by “Disallow: /” to the robots.txt file, sites can prevent the crawler’s access. CCBot typically operates from AWS IP addresses, as its infrastructure runs on Amazon Web Services. Each crawl takes several weeks, focusing on a broad range of pages rather than the entire internet. The bot aims to minimize server load by pacing its requests. Datasets are published in WARC format and stored on AWS S3, accessible for free though download costs incur bandwidth charges.

Common Crawl Data Flow:

Common Crawl Compared to Alternatives

Common Crawl offers a unique, cost-effective resource compared to other web data providers. Here’s a comparison:

Service	Cost	Dataset Size	Update Frequency	Primary Use Case
Common Crawl	Free	250+ TB per crawl	Monthly	AI training, research
Internet Archive	Free	70+ PB total	Continuous	Historical web preservation
Google BigQuery	Pay per query	Subset of web	Varies	Data analysis
AWS Public Datasets	Free access, pay bandwidth	Varies	Depends on dataset	Cloud-based research
Commercial crawlers	Paid licenses	Custom	On-demand	Business intelligence

Common Crawl distinguishes itself with its accessibility and focus on bulk data. In contrast, the Internet Archive is aimed at preserving historical web content, while commercial services offer targeted data at significant costs.

Data Privacy and CCBot

CCBot Access Control:

CCBot gathers publicly accessible data, meaning any unsecured page can be included in the Common Crawl dataset. Website owners concerned about their content’s use in AI training should update their robots.txt file to control access. While some choose to block CCBot to prevent AI data collection, others allow it in support of open data initiatives. Blocking CCBot doesn’t stop other proprietary crawlers from accessing sites, as many AI companies run their own web crawlers.

The Scale of Common Crawl Data

The scale of data collected by Common Crawl is immense. Each crawl captures around 3 to 4 billion web pages and exceeds 250 terabytes in compressed form. Since 2011, over 80 datasets have been released, totaling more than 20 petabytes of data. Besides HTML, datasets include metadata, HTTP headers, and extracted text. Common Crawl provides web graph data, illustrating how pages interlink. Processing is resource-intensive, requiring distributed computing systems on platforms like AWS EMR or Google Cloud Dataflow. Large organizations with substantial computing capabilities frequently utilize this data.

How to Block or Allow CCBot

Website owners can manage CCBot’s access via the robots.txt file. To block CCBot, create or edit the robots.txt in your site’s root directory with the following:

User-agent: CCBot  
Disallow: /

For more selective blocking:

User-agent: CCBot  
Disallow: /private/  
Disallow: /user-data/

To allow CCBot, simply omit the Disallow rule as the default setting permits crawling. Note that robots.txt requests are not security measures; while CCBot complies, malicious bots might not. Use authentication or IP blocking for security. Changes take effect when CCBot next crawls your site, and they can be verified using online tools or Google Search Console.

Impact on AI Development

Common Crawl has been pivotal in AI development. Before extensive datasets like these, natural language processing systems had limited training data. Academic datasets contained far fewer words, whereas modern AI models use billions or trillions of tokens. Common Crawl’s machine learning datasets fueled innovations in areas such as machine translation and text generation. It allows smaller teams to build competitive models, spurring new ideas in AI research. Beyond language AI model training, the datasets help researchers analyze web trends and track content changes, fostering new research fields.

End

CCBot functions as the web scraping bot behind Common Crawl, a vital resource in AI development. By visiting billions of web pages monthly, it creates free datasets fueling AI training and research. Leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Google, have utilized Common Crawl data for training their models. The mission to democratize web data empowers smaller developers and researchers to engage in AI innovations. Website owners can regulate CCBot’s access using robots.txt, supporting or rejecting the open data initiative. With each crawl exceeding 250 terabytes, Common Crawl’s scale is vast, making understanding CCBot essential for professionals in AI and machine learning fields.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I access the Common Crawl dataset?

The Common Crawl dataset is available for free and can be accessed via the Common Crawl website. Datasets are stored in WARC format on AWS S3, and while the data itself is free, you may incur bandwidth charges when downloading it.

What should I do if I want to prevent CCBot from accessing my website?

You can prevent CCBot from crawling your site by modifying your robots.txt file. By adding "User-agent: CCBot" followed by "Disallow: /", you can block the crawler from accessing all content on your website.

Why is Common Crawl important for AI research?

Common Crawl provides massive datasets that are essential for training AI models, allowing smaller organizations and researchers access to resources previously limited to larger corporations. This democratization of data fosters innovation and enables new developments in natural language processing and machine learning.

Can I use Common Crawl's data without technical skills?

While the data is freely available, some technical skills are typically required to process and analyze it effectively. However, there are tools and libraries available that can assist those with limited experience in using the dataset more efficiently.

How often does CCBot crawl the web?

CCBot crawls the web continuously, conducting crawls that take several weeks and releasing updated datasets every few months. Each crawl captures a significant amount of data, typically amounting to several hundred terabytes.

What types of data does Common Crawl collect?

Common Crawl collects a wide variety of data from web pages, including HTML content, images, metadata, and HTTP headers. It also includes web graph data that illustrates how pages link to one another, providing comprehensive insights into the structure of the web.

Are there alternatives to Common Crawl?

Yes, there are several alternatives to Common Crawl, such as the Internet Archive, Google BigQuery, and various commercial data providers. Each has its own focus, cost structure, and dataset offerings, but Common Crawl stands out for its size and free access for users.