Agentic Web Census

August 2026by Omitsis

English

AI agent · August 2026

cohere-ai in robots.txt: who blocks it

2.7% of the 15,009 sites in the census name cohere-ai in their robots.txt, and 92.3% of those block it.

2.7%
Sites naming it

Sites naming it

Sample
n=15,009
Coverage
100.0%

The August 2026 crawl, parsed for a robots.txt rule naming this user-agent, on the same 0.1% sample of the corpus as every other figure on this site — 15,009 sites. It used to be measured on the whole corpus and this note used to say so; it moved to the monthly sample when the axis gained a series, so it now carries the same margin as everything else.

2.5%
Sites blocking it

Sites blocking it

Sample
n=15,009
Coverage
100.0%
Name it
Name it: 2.7%
2.7%
Block it
Block it: 2.5%
2.5%
00.250.500.751.0
Of the 15,009 sites in the census, 2.7% name cohere-ai and 2.5% forbid it. Both bars are the same base, so the gap between them is the sites that named it to let it in.

What cohere-ai actually does

Run by Cohere. Crawls to train Cohere models. Blocking it costs you no traffic: this crawler does not send anyone your way.

What to write in your robots.txt

Put the rule in its own group. A Disallow under User-agent: * predates these agents and several of them do not treat it as applying to them — which is also why this census does not count it.

User-agent: cohere-ai
Disallow: /
robots.txtTurns cohere-ai away. Blocking it costs you no traffic: this crawler does not send anyone your way.
User-agent: cohere-ai
Allow: /
robots.txtLets it through, said out loud rather than by saying nothing. Either way it is a published preference and not a wall: robots.txt enforces nothing.