Check whether AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended can access your website. Analyze robots.txt rules and HTTP responses for 10 major AI bots.
AI-powered search is reshaping how customers find businesses. OneStepToRank monitors your visibility across Google, AI assistants, and local search 24/7.
Get StartedIn 2025 and beyond, AI-powered search engines and assistants have become major sources of website traffic. Tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity all crawl the web to provide answers to their users. If your site blocks these crawlers, your content will not appear in AI-generated answers, potentially costing you significant visibility and traffic.
At the same time, some AI bots crawl purely to train their models on your content, without directly driving traffic back to your site. Understanding the difference between training crawlers and search/browsing crawlers lets you make informed decisions about which bots to allow.
You have two primary methods to control which AI bots access your site:
User-agent: GPTBot followed by Disallow: / to block a specific bot. This is the standard, voluntary protocol that all major AI crawlers respect.Use this tool alongside our SERP Previewer to ensure your content looks great in both traditional and AI-powered search results, and our Local Rank Checker to monitor how your visibility changes over time.
Major AI companies deploy web crawlers to train models and power features like ChatGPT browsing, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity search. The 10 bots we test include GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider, CCBot, FacebookBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot-Extended, and Cohere-AI. Controlling access to these bots determines whether your content is used for AI training and whether it appears in AI-generated answers.
Add rules to your robots.txt file. For example, "User-agent: GPTBot" followed by "Disallow: /" blocks OpenAI's training crawler. Each bot has a unique user-agent string. You can selectively block some bots while allowing others -- for instance, blocking GPTBot (training) while keeping ChatGPT-User (browsing) allowed so your content still shows up in ChatGPT conversations.
It depends on your goals. Blocking training crawlers like GPTBot or CCBot prevents your content from training AI models, which some publishers prefer for copyright reasons. However, blocking search-oriented bots like ChatGPT-User or PerplexityBot means your content will not appear in those AI assistants' answers. Many site owners block training bots while allowing AI search bots.
robots.txt is a voluntary standard -- well-behaved bots check it first, but nothing technically forces compliance. HTTP-level blocking uses server configuration to actively reject requests with 403 Forbidden responses based on user-agent detection. HTTP blocking is more enforceable. For maximum protection, use both methods together.