TurnitinBot

TurnitinBot is the web crawler for Turnitin, a company that provides academic integrity solutions to educational institutions. The bot systematically crawls the internet to collect publicly available content for its plagiarism detection service. It identifies itself in server logs with a user-agent string like TurnitinBot/2.1 (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html). The bot is designed to focus specifically on extracting text content and does not process dynamic elements like JavaScript. The content it collects becomes part of Turnitin's reference database.

TurnitinBot is visiting your website to gather its text content to add to its comparison database. The bot prioritizes content with academic relevance, such as scholarly articles and educational resources, which students might reference or copy. The frequency of visits depends on your site's content and how often it is updated. The crawling is generally considered authorized as it respects standard web protocols and accesses only publicly available information.

The purpose of TurnitinBot is to support Turnitin's plagiarism detection service. When a student submits a paper, it is compared against the bot's database to identify potential matches with existing online sources. This helps educational institutions maintain academic integrity. The bot does not store complete copies of websites but creates text fingerprints for similarity matching. While website owners do not directly benefit from the crawl, the broader academic ecosystem benefits from tools that uphold standards of original scholarship.

To prevent TurnitinBot from indexing your content for its plagiarism database, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing crawler access.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /