Terracotta Bot: Robots.txt & Crawl Policy Reference

AI Summary: Terracotta Bot is a web crawler associated with Ceramic. It is primarily used for search indexing and data aggregation to support AI-driven features.

Role and policy boundary

Terracotta Bot acts as a background indexer. Its exact use case is less widely documented than major players like Google or OpenAI, but it falls into the broad category of AI search and data collection bots. Site owners should evaluate it based on their general policy towards third-party AI crawlers.

A robots rule is a declaration of intent; it does not replace authentication, authorization, or rate limiting. Start with a dedicated group:

User-agent: terracotta-bot
Allow: /
Disallow: /staging/
Disallow: /internal/

To stop access for the entire site, use:

User-agent: terracotta-bot
Disallow: /

Avoid assuming that User-agent: * expresses the same business intent. A wildcard can affect assistant and training crawlers too, and it makes later audits harder because the source of the decision is less specific.

Layered verification

Verify the same URL through each control plane instead of assuming that one green signal represents the whole request path. Compare the bot-specific robots group, the page-level metadata, and the response headers captured at the public edge.

Standard robots.txt directives should be used to control Terracotta Bot. If you employ a default-deny policy for unknown AI bots, you should explicitly block this User-Agent.

The Policy Engine evaluates the selected user-agent, path scope, and the other supplied layers independently. It can therefore explain why a bot is allowed while another is blocked, rather than returning one blended website score.

Page-level directives can still override the intended outcome for indexing:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

If a response uses these tags, the report marks the result as blocked or conflicting even if the crawler-specific robots group is permissive. This is especially important for canonical pages served through an edge cache where headers may differ from the origin response.

WAF and Nginx remediation examples

{
  "description": "Observe terracotta-bot candidates",
  "expression": "lower(http.user_agent) contains \"terracotta-bot\"",
  "action": "log"
}

To prevent Terracotta Bot from accessing your site, use a standard User-Agent block in your WAF or server configuration:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "terracotta-bot") {
    return 403;
}

Use your platform's actual middleware response pattern rather than copying this simplified example without review. Never place a secret, verification token, or internal policy identifier in a public response header.

Review checklist

Use this checklist after every policy change and after a CDN or WAF migration. Record the request URL, User-Agent, HTTP status, final redirect, and the exact evidence used to reach the decision.

Verify that the dedicated group appears before relying on a wildcard, test a representative public and private path, and compare live response headers with robots.txt. Keep the policy close to the content owner's intent and record whether the site wants discovery, citation, or no access at all.

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