CCBot vs Google-Extended: Which AI Crawler Should You Allow or Block?
Complete side-by-side comparison of CCBot (Common Crawl) and Google-Extended (Google): user-agent strings, safety ratings, SEO impact, and copy-paste blocking rules. Updated August 2026.
Quick Verdict
Google-Extended has the better safety profile (Safe) compared to CCBot (Caution). If you allow only one, Google-Extended is the lower-risk choice. CCBot warrants closer monitoring in your server logs, and server-level blocking if robots.txt directives are not respected.
| Attribute | CCBot | Google-Extended |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Common Crawl | |
| User-agent string | CCBot |
Google-Extended |
| Category | Data Scrapers | AI & LLM Bots |
| Safety rating | Caution | Safe |
| SEO impact if blocked | Low - No SEO ranking impact | Low - No SEO ranking impact |
| Recommendation | Consider blocking based on your content strategy. | Generally safe to allow; provides legitimate crawling value. |
| Official docs | CCBot docs | Google-Extended docs |
What is CCBot?
CCBot is the crawler for Common Crawl, a non-profit that scrapes the web to provide open datasets. While useful for research, it consumes significant bandwidth.
Full CCBot guideWhat is Google-Extended?
A standalone token that allows web publishers to control whether their content is used to train Google's AI models (Gemini, Vertex AI) without affecting Google Search ranking.
Full Google-Extended guideHow to block each bot
Block CCBot in robots.txt
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
Block Google-Extended in robots.txt
User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: /
Want to block or allow many bots at once? Use our free robots.txt generator with 248+ bot presets, then verify with the AI crawler checker.
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