ICCCrawler is a bot in the AI crawlers category, operated by NICT.
ICC-Crawler automatically crawls the Internet and collects web pages. ICC-Crawler is operated by the Universal Communication Research Institute at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
AI crawlers collect web pages in bulk to build training data for large language models and other AI systems. They take content without sending visitors back. Most publishers block them in robots.txt or at the WAF unless they have a licensing deal with the operator.
ICCCrawler identifies itself with this user agent string:
ICC-Crawler/3.0 (Mozilla-compatible; ; https://ucri.nict.go.jp/en/icccrawler.html)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
ICCCrawler follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: ICC-Crawler Disallow: /
User-agent: ICC-Crawler Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: ICC-Crawler Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: ICC-Crawler Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: ICC-Crawler group, ICCCrawler ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.ICC-Crawler from ICCCrawler's user agent; check NICT's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
ICCCrawler takes articles for AI training without sending readers back, and its page loads count as invalid traffic if your ad tags fire. Decide whether to license, limit or block it, and keep it out of ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersVisits from ICCCrawler to your landing pages are not people. Keep them out of conversion, retargeting and audience data so you do not pay to reach a crawler.
Transfon Security for advertisersICCCrawler can copy product descriptions, prices and reviews in bulk. Allow it on pages you want AI models to know about and block it on search, cart and account pages.
Transfon Security for e-commerceICCCrawler can fetch documentation and public app pages at scale. Rate limit it so it does not slow the product for paying users.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows ICCCrawler by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
ICCCrawler is a bot in the AI crawlers category, operated by NICT. ICC-Crawler automatically crawls the Internet and collects web pages. ICC-Crawler is operated by the Universal Communication Research Institute at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
Yes. ICCCrawler follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the ICC-Crawler user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: ICC-Crawler" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "ICC-Crawler/" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so ICCCrawler may not follow it, and anyone can send ICCCrawler's user agent, so a fake ICCCrawler ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
AI crawlers collect web pages in bulk to build training data for large language models and other AI systems. They take content without sending visitors back. Most publishers block them in robots.txt or at the WAF unless they have a licensing deal with the operator.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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