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Directory/Independent Web Indexes/Common Crawl

Common Crawl

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Nonprofit open web archive with 9.5 PB of data — the foundational dataset behind 64% of major LLMs including GPT-3.

Independent web indexes maintain their own crawl of the web, separate from Google or Bing. This independence is valuable for AI applications that need unbiased search results, want to avoid rate limits on commercial search engines, or need specialized coverage. Several of these indexes are open source, allowing full transparency into how results are ranked.

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Features

—JS Rendering
✓Structured Output
✓Open Source
✓Self-Hosted Option
Pricing:Free

Editorial assessment

The bedrock of the modern AI era — 80%+ of GPT-3's training tokens came from Common Crawl. 9.5 PB of freely available web data, 2.4B pages crawled monthly. Not an API you query for search results. This is a massive archive you download and process yourself, requiring significant compute infrastructure. Free in cost, expensive in engineering.

How Common Crawl compares

Brave Search API

Brave Search API provides a queryable index with API access, no infrastructure needed.

Mojeek

Mojeek provides a smaller but queryable independent index via API.

Webz.io

Webz.io pre-processes Common Crawl-scale data into queryable feeds for teams that can't run their own infrastructure.

Frequently asked questions

What is Common Crawl?

Nonprofit open web archive with 9.5 PB of data — the foundational dataset behind 64% of major LLMs including GPT-3. It falls under the Independent Web Indexes category in our directory. Common Crawl is open source, meaning you can inspect the code and self-host it.

How much does Common Crawl cost?

Common Crawl uses a free pricing model. It is completely free to use.

What are the best alternatives to Common Crawl?

The top alternatives to Common Crawl include Brave Search API, Mojeek, Webz.io. Each offers a different approach to independent web indexes — see our comparison section above for detailed analysis.

Does Common Crawl support JavaScript rendering?

No, Common Crawl does not include built-in JavaScript rendering. For dynamic websites, you may need to pair it with a headless browser or choose a tool that includes JS rendering.

Does Common Crawl provide structured output?

Yes, Common Crawl returns structured output (typically JSON), making it straightforward to integrate into AI pipelines, RAG systems, and data processing workflows.

Can I self-host Common Crawl?

Yes, Common Crawl offers a self-hosted option, giving you full control over the infrastructure, data privacy, and deployment environment.

Latest News

Common Crawl March 2026 Archive Published4d ago
Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical RecordMar 16, 2026

Weekly briefing — tool launches, legal shifts, market data.