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Terracotta

The Terracotta bot scrapes websites for use in generating indices for serving searches using Ceramic's search product.
CeramicTerracotta
Search Engine Crawler

What is Terracotta?

Terracotta is Ceramic's search engine crawler. The Terracotta bot scrapes websites for use in generating indices for serving searches using Ceramic's search product.

Terracotta powers a search engine, and search indexes increasingly feed AI answers and overviews alongside classic results. The pages it can crawl are the pages eligible to rank and to be pulled into AI-generated summaries, so allowing it protects both your SEO and your AI search visibility.

Like any automated client, Terracotta consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle Terracotta

Most sites keep Terracotta allowed, because blocking it can remove your pages from the search results and AI answers it powers. Only disallow it if you specifically want to opt out of that surface.

To control Terracotta, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Terracotta
Disallow: /

Ceramic does not publish a robots.txt commitment for Terracotta, so confirm how it behaves by watching your access logs.

Examples

  • After publishing a new comparison page, a marketer checks whether Terracotta has fetched it so the content can appear in search results.
  • An SEO lead keeps Terracotta allowed in robots.txt to preserve visibility in search and AI-powered answers.

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Frequently asked questions about Terracotta

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Terracotta is operated by Ceramic. It functions as Ceramic's search engine crawler.

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