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AI crawler access

Free AI Crawler Access Checker

Enter your domain and see whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 11 other AI crawlers can reach your site. We fetch your robots.txt, evaluate it the way crawlers do, and show exactly which line blocks each one.

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We fetch your robots.txt and test root access for 14 AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, and others.

Why sites block AI search without meaning to

In 2023 and 2024, when AI companies started scraping the web for training data, thousands of sites copied the same robots.txt snippet from a blog post and blocked every user agent with "GPT" or "AI" in its name. At the time that was a reasonable reaction: the only AI crawlers in existence gathered training data, and blocking them cost nothing. The web has changed since then. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity now answer buyer questions by fetching and citing live pages, and they do it through crawlers that respect robots.txt. A blanket block written for the training era now silently removes your site from AI answers.

The distinction that matters is what each crawler is for. There are three kinds. Training crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, and Bytespider collect pages to train future models; blocking them is a legitimate policy choice and has no effect on AI search visibility. Search crawlers like OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot build the indexes that AI assistants pull answers from. User-triggered crawlers like ChatGPT-User and Claude-User fetch a page live because a person asked the assistant to look at it. Block either of the last two kinds and AI assistants cannot cite you, no matter how good your content is. A buyer asking ChatGPT for recommendations will get a shortlist built entirely from your competitors' pages.

The fix is usually a few lines. Keep your training-crawler blocks if that reflects your policy, and add explicit allow groups for the search and user-triggered agents, for example User-agent: OAI-SearchBot followed by Allow: /. If your file has a User-agent: * group with Disallow: /, fix that first, because it blocks every crawler you have not named. You can verify any edit against specific paths with our robots.txt tester, and give AI assistants a curated map of your best content with the llms.txt generator.

Crawler access is the floor for AI visibility. Once the crawlers can reach you, measure whether the assistants actually mention and cite your brand with the AI visibility checker, then work through the answer engine optimization playbook to earn a spot in the answers.

More free AI search tools

  • Schema Markup Validator Validate every JSON-LD block on a page and catch the mistakes that block rich results.
  • Title Tag Checker Preview your title and description in Google and as an AI citation, with length checks.
  • Robots.txt Tester Test any URL path against your robots.txt and see exactly which rule matches.
  • llms.txt Generator Generate a spec-compliant llms.txt file that gives AI assistants a clean map of your site.
  • Meta Description Generator Get three SEO-ready meta descriptions under 160 characters, with live length checks.
  • AI Visibility Checker Run one prompt across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and see whether your brand is mentioned or cited.
  • All free tools Local rank audit, Google Business Profile audit, Maps rank checker, schema validator, and more.

Frequently asked.

Should I block GPTBot?
It depends on how you weigh training against distribution. GPTBot gathers pages for training OpenAI's models and also feeds OpenAI's search index, so blocking it keeps your content out of future training runs but can also reduce your presence in ChatGPT's search layer. If you sell something and want buyers to find you through ChatGPT, most businesses are better off allowing it. If you publish original content and object to it being used for training, blocking GPTBot while explicitly allowing OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User preserves most of your AI search visibility.
Does blocking Google-Extended hurt my Google rankings?
No. Google-Extended is an opt-out token for using your content to train Gemini models. It is evaluated separately from Googlebot, which handles Google Search crawling and ranking. Blocking Google-Extended has no effect on your position in Google Search results or on whether you appear in AI Overviews, which run on the regular search index.
How do I unblock an AI crawler?
Edit your robots.txt file at the root of your domain. If the crawler is blocked by its own group, remove or relax that group's Disallow lines. If it is caught by a wildcard group (User-agent: * with Disallow rules), add a dedicated group above or below it, for example: User-agent: OAI-SearchBot, then Allow: /. A crawler follows the most specific group that names it, so a dedicated group overrides the wildcard for that crawler. Changes take effect the next time the crawler refetches your robots.txt, typically within about a day.
Do AI companies actually respect robots.txt?
The named crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Apple, Perplexity, Meta, Amazon, and Common Crawl all publicly commit to obeying robots.txt, and independent server-log studies broadly confirm they do for their documented user agents. That said, robots.txt is a voluntary protocol with no technical enforcement: it depends on the crawler identifying itself honestly. Unnamed scrapers and bots that spoof browser user agents ignore it entirely. Treat robots.txt as effective policy for the major players and use server-level controls if you need hard guarantees.
What is the difference between GPTBot and ChatGPT-User?
GPTBot crawls the web proactively to collect training data and build OpenAI's index; it visits on OpenAI's schedule, without any user involved. ChatGPT-User fetches a specific page in real time because a ChatGPT user asked a question that required browsing, or pasted your URL. Blocking GPTBot is a training opt-out. Blocking ChatGPT-User stops ChatGPT from reading your pages even when a real person directly asks it to, which usually hurts you with zero upside.

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