🤖 Overview

CCBot is a web crawler operated by the Creative Commons organization, primarily used to discover and index web pages that are publicly available under Creative Commons licenses. Its core purpose is to populate the search index for the Creative Commons Search platform (now integrated into Openverse) enabling users to find openly licensed content. The bot is also involved in detecting license metadata and verifying proper attribution statements on millions of web pages globally.

🌐 Technical Behavior

CCBot performs standard HTTP GET requests using HTTP/1.1 and respects the Accept-Encoding: gzip header. It typically crawls at a moderate, non‑aggressive rate — approximately 1 request per 10–20 seconds per domain, though this can vary depending on server response times. The IP addresses used by CCBot are mainly drawn from the Creative Commons cloud hosting provider range, but no static IP list is publicly documented; they currently resolve from ec2‑*.compute‑1.amazonaws.com under AWS. The crawler uses HTTP/1.1 and does not support HTTP/2 or HTTP/3. It follows all rel="nofollow" and canonical tags and does not execute JavaScript. The crawl depth is limited to a single domain per session, and it avoids binary file types (e.g., .pdf, .mp4) unless they are explicitly linked with license metadata.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the official Creative Commons FAQ (published at https://creativecommons.org/faq#ccbot), CCBot fully respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol. It honors both Disallow directives and Crawl‑delay directives. The bot also supports the X‑Robots‑Tag HTTP header and the tag, allowing site owners to block indexing of specific content without altering robots.txt.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The User‑Agent string for CCBot is CCBot/2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/faq#ccbot) — the version number may vary (e.g., CCBot/1.0 in earlier years). There is no associated From header, but the bot sometimes includes a X‑CCBot‑ID header with a numeric identifier. The bot also sends a standard Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 header. Web server logs can reliably identify CCBot by matching the User‑Agent and the origin IP range from AWS, though the lack of a static IP list means DNS‑based verification is more reliable.

📊 Data Usage

The collected data is used exclusively to build and maintain the Openverse search index (formerly Creative Commons Search), which allows users to find over 600 million openly licensed images, audio, and other media. No data is used for AI/ML training, behavioral profiling, or commercial resale. The metadata extracted includes license type, attribution endpoint, and page titles, but full page content is not stored — only the URL and license information are kept in the index, as documented in the Openverse repository on GitHub.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because CCBot is an automated crawler that may inadvertently overwhelm smaller or less optimized web servers, rate limiting is prudent to maintain service stability. A threshold‑based blocking strategy — for example, limiting CCBot to 5 requests per 60 seconds per IP — is recommended, as the bot itself plans to respect such limits and will not circumvent them. This policy ensures that legitimate indexing continues without degrading server performance for human users.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.