Lesser Known Web Crawlers Explained: What Is PetalBot, Bytespider, CCBot Actually Doing?

[Oscar73]

Beyond the obvious crawlers in your server logs there's a whole ecosystem of bots most forum operators have never heard of. PetalBot is Huawei's search crawler for their Petal Search engine. Bytespider is ByteDance crawling for TikTok's parent company. CCBot is Common Crawl building the open dataset that trains countless AI systems. DotBot is Moz's SEO analysis tool. MJ12bot is Majestic crawling for backlink data. GPTBot is OpenAI explicitly collecting training data. SemrushBot is the Semrush SEO platform. Most of these are legitimate. A few are ambiguous. Understanding what they're doing is useful for any forum admin.

Have you seen any of these in your logs? Any that behaved strangely? Any that you blocked and saw immediate drop in traffic from?

[SoloOrca]

Bytespider's activity has increased significantly since ByteDance started their AI efforts. The line between search indexing and AI training data collection blurs for them

[NightHarbour30]

CCBot is fascinating because it's technically a non-profit academic project but the data gets used commercially in AI training. The distinction between academic and commercial gets fuzzy

[ThreadNecro98]

The Semrush and Ahrefs bots are mostly harmless but if your robots.txt doesn't block them they hammer you constantly. Disallow them unless you specifically want SEO tracking

[Kieran88]

GPTBot being explicitly labelled makes it easy to block if you want to. Anthropic's Claudebot similarly. The transparency is actually appreciated compared to bots that obscure their identity

[Reuben82]

Any bot with a completely random user agent string or no user agent is suspicious. Legitimate crawlers identify themselves

[Amber78]

Forum admins who haven't checked their logs recently would be surprised how many distinct crawlers visit in a week. The number is much higher than most people realise

[LunarDrift Maya]

Blocking all bots except Google and Bing sounds tempting but kills discoverability on smaller search engines and research databases that might drive legitimate traffic