Can AI Crawlers Find Your Content?

AI crawlers are bots used by AI companies to index web content for their platforms. GPTBot powers ChatGPT's web browsing and search, ClaudeBot indexes content for Anthropic's Claude, PerplexityBot feeds Perplexity AI's search engine, and Google-Extended is used for Gemini and AI training. If these bots are blocked in your robots.txt, your content cannot appear in AI-generated answers — a rapidly growing discovery channel.

Enter your domain in the tool above. We fetch your robots.txt and parse every User-agent directive to determine which AI crawlers are allowed and which are blocked. We check 8 AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Bytespider, Amazonbot, FacebookBot) plus 2 search crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot).

It depends on your content strategy. Allowing AI crawlers means your content can be cited in AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini), which drives referral traffic and brand visibility. Blocking them prevents your content from being used in AI training data or AI answers. Many publishers are selectively allowing some bots while blocking others — for example, allowing GPTBot (which drives referral traffic via ChatGPT) while blocking CCBot (which provides training data without direct attribution).

Googlebot is Google's main search crawler — blocking it removes you from Google Search results entirely. Google-Extended is specifically for Google's AI features (Gemini, AI Overviews, training data). You can block Google-Extended while keeping Googlebot allowed, which means you stay in Google Search but opt out of AI training and some AI-generated features.

In your robots.txt file, find the 'User-agent: GPTBot' (or whichever bot) section and remove or modify the 'Disallow: /' line. You can also add 'Allow: /' explicitly. To selectively allow access, use specific paths: 'Disallow: /private/' blocks only that directory while allowing the rest of your site.

CCBot is the crawler for Common Crawl, a massive open dataset used to train many AI models including those behind ChatGPT and Claude. Allowing CCBot means your content may be included in future AI training data. Unlike GPTBot, CCBot doesn't directly drive referral traffic — it feeds the training pipeline. Some sites block CCBot while allowing GPTBot to get AI search visibility without contributing to training data.

No. Blocking AI-specific crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot has no effect on Google Search rankings. Only blocking Googlebot affects your Google Search visibility. However, blocking Google-Extended may affect whether your content appears in Google's AI Overviews and Gemini responses.

Studies show roughly 5-15% of the top 1,000 websites have blocked at least one AI crawler as of 2025, primarily news publishers and content-heavy sites. The trend is toward selective blocking — allowing bots that drive referral traffic while blocking those that only contribute to training data.

Reputable AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot respect robots.txt directives. However, robots.txt is a voluntary standard, not a technical enforcement mechanism. Some less scrupulous crawlers may ignore it. For stronger protection, consider server-side blocking by User-Agent string or IP range.

Review your robots.txt at least quarterly. CMS updates, security plugins, and hosting changes can inadvertently add or modify crawler rules. Some WordPress security plugins block AI crawlers by default. Our tool makes it easy to spot-check which bots can access your content in seconds.