Bytespider
ByteDance’s crawler, gathering content used for TikTok’s search and for Doubao.
16.3% of the 2,228 domains Domduck read on disallow it, against 13.5% on .
What blocking Bytespider costs
Your content stops being gathered for ByteDance products.
What it does not cost
It has no relationship to any Western search engine.
It has a long-standing reputation for crawling aggressively, so some sites block it for load reasons rather than for anything to do with AI.
How to block it
or allow it explicitlyUser-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /To allow it and say so, use a bare Disallow: with nothing after it, which RFC 9309 defines as “nothing is disallowed”. That matters more than it looks: a file that never names an agent leaves it in a third state, neither allowed nor blocked, and a catch-all rule added later will block it without anyone deciding to.
Block rate over time
2 daysThe percentage of domains in the corpus whose robots.txt disallows Bytespider, measured once per domain per pass. The denominator is how many domains were read that day and is stored with each point, so the line is not restated when the corpus grows.
The other seven
- OpenAI
- GPTBot
- OpenAI
- OAI-SearchBot
- Anthropic
- ClaudeBot
- Perplexity
- PerplexityBot
- Google-Extended
- Apple
- Applebot-Extended
- Common Crawl
- CCBot
How this page is made
The explanation above is written by a person. The numbers are computed from Domduck’s own daily reads of each domain’s robots.txt, parsed to RFC 9309 rather than searched for a string: a rule binds to the nearest preceding group of user-agent lines, the longest matching pattern wins, and Allow breaks a tie. No prefix matching is done, so a group naming Google is not treated as a policy about Google-Extended. What the collectors have read.