Common Crawl

The Common Crawl Foundation (Common Crawl) is a nonprofit501(c)(3) organization that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Access to the data is free on Amazon Web Services, but users may incur storage and compute costs.

Common Crawl was founded by Gil Elbaz.

The data had mostly been primarily used by researchers and some startups until the 2020s, when AI companies started training large language models using the data. In November 2025, an investigation by The Atlantic revealed that Common Crawl misled publishers when it claimed it respected paywalls in its scraping and it was not honoring requests from publishers to have their content removed from its databases.