Operated by ByteDance
The aggressive web crawler operated by ByteDance (parent company of TikTok). It is known for high crawl rates and is primarily used to gather data for their Large Language Models (Doubao/Lark).
The aggressive web crawler operated by ByteDance (parent company of TikTok). It is known for high crawl rates and is primarily used to gather data for their Large Language Models (Doubao/Lark).
Bytespider is a data aggregation crawler. Unlike search bots or AI crawlers, its purpose is typically to collect content for private datasets, price monitoring, or research. Blocking Bytespider via robots.txt or at the server level has NO negative SEO impact. If you see excessive crawl volume from this bot in your logs, a hard block is recommended.
<code>User-agent: Bytespider</code> — Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately. For aggressive bots, supplement with server-level blocking for guaranteed enforcement.
Understanding Bytespider's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.
Bytespider. 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 Bytespider by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP — legitimate bots resolve back to their operator's domain./robots.txt file:
User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: /This instructs Bytespider 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.Bytespider (case-insensitive grep: grep -i "Bytespider" /var/log/nginx/access.log). You can also check Google Search Console → Coverage → Crawl Stats for Googlebot variants. For Bytespider specifically, filter by user-agent in your log analysis tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).Disallow: / you can restrict Bytespider to specific paths:
User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /staging/ Allow: /This allows Bytespider everywhere except the listed paths. Path matching in robots.txt uses prefix matching —
Disallow: /private/ blocks /private/page.html but NOT /public/private/.Crawl-delay: 30 below the User-agent directive in robots.txt.
2. Rate-limit the user-agent via Nginx's limit_req_zone or Apache's mod_ratelimit.
3. Block it outright at Cloudflare WAF with rule: http.user_agent contains "Bytespider".
4. Use fail2ban to auto-block IPs exceeding request thresholds.