Published on 2025-08-07T06:18:08Z

AI2Bot

AI2Bot is a web crawler operated by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a non-profit research organization. Its purpose is to collect public web data, such as text and images, to build datasets for AI research projects. Unlike commercial crawlers, AI2Bot's goal is to support scientific advancement in fields like natural language processing and machine learning, with many of its resulting datasets and models being made available to the public.

What is AI2Bot?

AI2Bot is a web crawler developed and run by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a non-profit research institute dedicated to advancing the field of AI. The bot systematically visits webpages to collect and analyze data to support AI2's research initiatives. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string AI2 Bot. The crawler functions by downloading web content to build large datasets used in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, and other machine learning applications. It is designed to be a good web citizen, respecting standard protocols like robots.txt.

Why is AI2Bot crawling my site?

AI2Bot is visiting your website to gather publicly available text, images, and structural information for its AI research datasets. It is particularly interested in content that has educational, scientific, or general informational value, as this material provides excellent training data for language models and other AI systems. The bot operates continuously but is designed to crawl at a respectful rate to avoid causing performance issues for web servers. Its presence is generally considered authorized as it follows standard web crawling practices.

What is the purpose of AI2Bot?

The primary purpose of AI2Bot is to support the Allen Institute's mission of advancing artificial intelligence research. The web content it collects is used to train and improve AI models that can perform tasks such as understanding language, answering complex questions, and summarizing text. By contributing data, website owners indirectly support scientific progress. Unlike commercial search engine bots, AI2Bot's goal is purely research-oriented, and many of the datasets and models developed from its data are released openly to the broader research community.

How do I block AI2Bot?

To prevent AI2Bot from crawling your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This is the standard and most effective method for managing access for well-behaved crawlers.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block AI2Bot:

User-agent: AI2 Bot
Disallow: /

How to verify the authenticity of the user-agent operated by Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence?

Reverse IP lookup technique

To verify user-agent authenticity, you can use host linux command two times with the IP address of the requester.
  1. > host IPAddressOfRequest
    This command returns the reverse lookup hostname (e.g., 4.4.8.8.in-addr.arpa.). 
  2. > host ReverseDNSFromTheOutputOfFirstRequest
If the output matches the original IP address and the domain is associated with a trusted operator (e.g., Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence), the user-agent can be considered legitimate.

IP list lookup technique

Some operators provide a public list of IP addresses used by their crawlers. This list can be cross-referenced to verify a user-agent's authenticity. However, both operators and website owners may find it challenging to maintain an up-to-date list, so use this method with caution and in conjunction with other verification techniques.