Operated by DigitalOcean
A crawler used by DigitalOcean, likely for internal GenAI product testing or data gathering.
A crawler used by DigitalOcean, likely for internal GenAI product testing or data gathering.
DigitalOceanGenAICrawler is an AI data-collection crawler operated by DigitalOcean. It harvests web content to build or expand training datasets for large language models (LLMs). Unlike search crawlers, DigitalOceanGenAICrawler does NOT influence your page ranking in any search engine. The user-agent string DigitalOceanGenAICrawler can be safely blocked via robots.txt, meta tags (noai), or the emerging llms.txt standard without any SEO penalty. Robots.txt is voluntary; for hard enforcement, combine it with server-level IP blocking.
User-agent: DigitalOceanGenAICrawler / Disallow: / without any SEO penalty. This is the recommended approach if you want to opt out of DigitalOcean's LLM training datasets.<code>User-agent: DigitalOceanGenAICrawler</code> — Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.
Understanding DigitalOceanGenAICrawler's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.
DigitalOceanGenAICrawler. This is the exact string you must use in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. User-agent matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive, but the string must be spelled correctly. You can verify that a request genuinely comes from DigitalOceanGenAICrawler by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP — legitimate bots resolve back to their operator's domain.User-agent: DigitalOceanGenAICrawler / Disallow: / without any SEO penalty. This is the recommended approach if you want to opt out of DigitalOcean's LLM training datasets./robots.txt file:
User-agent: DigitalOceanGenAICrawler Disallow: /This instructs DigitalOceanGenAICrawler not to crawl any path on your site. The Disallow: / directive covers the entire domain including subfolders. To only block specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g.,
Disallow: /blog/). Note: robots.txt is publicly readable — any bot or human can inspect it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.DigitalOceanGenAICrawler (case-insensitive grep: grep -i "DigitalOceanGenAICrawler" /var/log/nginx/access.log). You can also check Google Search Console → Coverage → Crawl Stats for Googlebot variants. For DigitalOceanGenAICrawler specifically, filter by user-agent in your log analysis tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).Disallow: / you can restrict DigitalOceanGenAICrawler to specific paths:
User-agent: DigitalOceanGenAICrawler Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /staging/ Allow: /This allows DigitalOceanGenAICrawler everywhere except the listed paths. Path matching in robots.txt uses prefix matching —
Disallow: /private/ blocks /private/page.html but NOT /public/private/.<meta name="DigitalOceanGenAICrawler" content="noai, noimageai, noindex"> to your pages.
2. Add a llms.txt file at your domain root (emerging standard).
3. Use Cloudflare WAF or Nginx to return 403 for this user-agent.
4. Consider IP blocklists for DigitalOcean's known crawler IP ranges.<meta name="DigitalOceanGenAICrawler" content="noindex">
• **X-Robots-Tag HTTP header**: X-Robots-Tag: noai, noimageai
• **llms.txt**: Add a /llms.txt file (similar to robots.txt but for LLMs)
• **Server block**: Return 403 or 429 for this user-agent via WAF or Nginx
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