ICC

1 crawler operated by ICC

Who ICC is, for site owners

ICC operates 1 crawler in our directory, filed under Data Scrapers. Its crawl behaviour is rated caution.

Blocking ICC carries an SEO impact score of 2/10. Blocking impact is rated: Low - No SEO ranking impact.

Our recommendation for ICC: Consider blocking based on your content strategy.

ICC at a glance

OperatorICC
Crawler in directory1
CategoriesData Scrapers
SEO impact if blocked2/10
Crawl behaviour1 rated caution
Official crawler docsICC crawler documentation

Crawler operated by ICC

What ICC's crawlers are for

ICC runs 1 crawler in our database. Grouped by the job each one does:

  • a utility crawler: ICC-Crawler

The highest-priority token is Tier 6. That makes ICC a lower-priority operator for most sites: worth a deliberate decision, but rarely the one that decides your visibility.

How site owners treat ICC

None of ICC's tokens were among the names tracked in our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000, which usually means few large sites write rules for them yet. Your own logs are the best evidence of how often they visit.

Writing one policy for ICC

A robots.txt file cannot say "ICC"; it can only name ICC's tokens, one group at a time. With a single token, one group is the whole policy.

# One token controls everything ICC fetches through it
User-agent: ICC-Crawler
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /
  1. Decide per job, not per company. Training, search and user-triggered fetching have different trade-offs, even from the same operator.
  2. Name every token you mean. A token you leave out follows User-agent: *.
  3. Repeat shared rules. A named group ignores the * group, so copy any Disallow lines you still want it to obey.
  4. Verify from outside. Run the AI crawler access test after any change to see the result for each ICC token, including firewall refusals.
Test yourself: does User-agent: ICC block all of ICC's crawlers?

No. robots.txt matches crawler tokens, not company names. Use the token ICC-Crawler.

Test yourself: if you block one ICC token, are the others blocked too?

No. Each token is read separately. Blocking one leaves the rest following whatever group applies to them.

Each ICC crawler, explained

A one-paragraph brief for every ICC token in our database, covering what it does, how it treats robots.txt and how often large sites write rules for it:

  • ICC-Crawler (ICC-Crawler, Tier 6): a utility crawler that harvests pages for a dataset or data product. Rated caution. ICC-Crawler's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the ICC-Crawler rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop. Not tracked in our robots.txt study.

Common mistakes with ICC's crawlers

The errors we see most often with ICC's crawlers in the files and firewalls we test:

  1. Treating ICC's crawlers as an AI or search crawler. Blocking it has little effect on visibility; decide based on load and what it does with your data.
  2. Relying on robots.txt alone when ICC's crawlers is rated caution or aggressive. Back the rule with a server-side block.
  3. Blocking ICC's crawlers by IP alone. Ranges change; match the token and verify with logs.

All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check ICC's crawlers from outside after every change.

What our own data shows about ICC

Everything below comes from the AI Crawler Check bot database and our two most recent robots.txt scans of the Tranco top 10,000, not from ICC's marketing. ICC has one token in our database, so the whole picture fits in one place.

ICC-Crawler in our records

We first recorded ICC-Crawler on March 17, 2026. ICC documents it on ucri.nict.go.jp, and we recheck that page before each release. No file in our top-10,000 scans names ICC-Crawler, so any rule you write for it puts you ahead of almost every large site.

Among the 39 data scrapers in our database, ICC-Crawler sits 19th by priority (Tier 6), level with Amazon Kendra, ApifyBot, Barkrowler, BLEXBot. 6 of the 39 share its caution rating. Other operators with a crawler that harvests pages for a dataset or data product: FirecrawlAgent (Firecrawl, Tier 2), iaskspider (iAsk, Tier 2), NovaAct (Amazon, Tier 2), CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler (Cloudflare, Tier 3), Amazon Kendra (Amazon, Tier 6). A policy for ICC-Crawler is usually a policy for these too.

A decision record for ICC-Crawler

Teams that review crawlers once a quarter keep one short entry per token, so anyone can see why a rule exists and when it was last checked. Filled in from our data, the ICC-Crawler entry reads:

  • Operator and job: ICC; it harvests pages for a dataset or data product.
  • Priority and behaviour: Tier 6, rated caution, blocking impact low.
  • Suggested starting point: Allow by default; revisit if it costs you bandwidth.
  • Enforcement: ICC-Crawler's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the ICC-Crawler rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.
User-agent: ICC-Crawler
Allow: /

Paste the line into the validator with one of your own URLs before it goes live. Revisit the ICC-Crawler entry sooner than most: a caution rating means ICC traffic deserves a monthly look at your logs.

Checking ICC-Crawler on your own site

Because ICC runs only ICC-Crawler in our records, one check covers the whole operator. Search your access logs for the string ICC-Crawler over the last 30 days, note how many requests it made and which paths it asked for, then compare that with what your robots.txt allows. Match the requests against what ICC publishes about the crawler, since that page is the only authority on its behaviour. A Tier 6 crawler rated caution rarely needs more than a quarterly look, and our log checker does the counting for you.

How top sites treat ICC's crawlers

From our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000 (5,583 valid files, fetched October 20, 2026):

None of the tokens for ICC's crawlers is tracked by name in our study. For scale, 20.1% of top-site files block at least one AI training crawler and 4.3% refuse every unnamed crawler with User-agent: * and Disallow: /, which would catch ICC's crawlers too.

More questions about ICC

Will blocking ICC affect my Google rankings?
Only if one of its tokens is a Google search crawler. None of ICC's tokens are Googlebot, so classic Google rankings are unaffected.
How quickly does a robots.txt change take effect for ICC?
Crawlers cache robots.txt, commonly for up to a day. Expect a change to apply within about 24 hours, and confirm it in your logs.
Can I allow ICC on some sections and block it on others?
Yes. Inside the group for ICC-Crawler, add Disallow lines for the paths to keep private and Allow lines for exceptions. The longest matching rule wins.
Does blocking ICC delete content it already collected?
No. robots.txt only controls future visits. For content already collected, check whether ICC offers a removal or opt-out process.
Is a firewall block better than robots.txt for ICC?
A firewall enforces the decision, while robots.txt asks politely. Many operators recommend robots.txt because blocking their IPs can stop them reading your rules at all. Use robots.txt first, and add a firewall rule only if requests continue.

A five-minute ICC review

  1. Confirm the token. Compare the user-agent in your logs with the tokens listed on this page. A close spelling is not the same crawler.
  2. Decide the outcome per crawler. Use the briefs above to choose allow, limit or block for each token.
  3. Write the group. Add or edit one User-agent group per decision and repeat any shared rules inside it.
  4. Publish and wait. Allow about a day for crawlers to fetch the new file.
  5. Confirm the result. Check your logs, then run the website crawlability test to see the outcome from outside, including any firewall layer.

How to block or allow ICC in robots.txt

This rule covers the single crawler ICC operates. Add it to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain.

Block ICC completely
User-agent: ICC-Crawler Disallow: /
Allow ICC explicitly
User-agent: ICC-Crawler Allow: /

These ICC rules ask; they do not enforce. If a ICC token ignores them, block it at the server or CDN. Paths are case-sensitive, and each rule matches the token, not the full user-agent string.

Frequently asked questions about ICC

What crawler does ICC run?
ICC operates 1 crawler in our directory: ICC-Crawler (user-agent ICC-Crawler).
Should I block ICC?
Consider blocking based on your content strategy. The SEO impact score for blocking is 2/10, where 10 means blocking costs you the most visibility.
How do I block ICC in robots.txt?
Add the following to robots.txt at your domain root: User-agent: ICC-Crawler then Disallow: /.
Does blocking ICC hurt my search rankings?
Blocking impact is rated: Low - No SEO ranking impact. Google's own ranking crawler is Googlebot, which this operator does not run, so blocking ICC does not by itself remove you from Google's index. What it can change is whether AI assistants and analytics tools can read your pages.
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