Diffbot

seo Diffbot\/

Diffbot web crawler for content extraction

About this crawler

Diffbot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Diffbot\/ in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as seo. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Diffbot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

4.0%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: Diffbot
2026-05-012026-06-045.3%

Technical details

Name
Diffbot
Pattern
Diffbot\/
Tags
seo
Reference
https://www.diffbot.com/
Added
2018/07/07
rDNS suffixes
.diffbot.com
Instances
1 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely Diffbot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

Sample User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729; Diffbot/0.1; +http://www.diffbot.com)

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow Diffbot:

User-agent: Diffbot Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Diffbot\/ [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Diffbot\\/") { return 403; }
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