AI Crawler Blocked Checker

SEOptimer’s AI Crawler Blocked Checker reads your robots.txt and reports whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers are allowed to read your site.

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About Blocking AI Crawlers

Which crawlers are we talking about?

The AI companies run their own named crawlers, and they are separate from the search crawlers you already know. GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot belong to OpenAI, ClaudeBot to Anthropic, PerplexityBot to Perplexity, Google-Extended governs Gemini training, and CCBot feeds Common Crawl, which many models are trained from.

Each obeys robots.txt in the ordinary way, so a rule naming its user-agent decides whether it can read your site. This checker reads your robots.txt and reports whether those crawlers are being blocked.

Being blocked is not automatically wrong. It is a decision, and the point of checking is to be sure it was one.

Why sites end up blocking them by accident

The common cause is a blanket rule. A robots.txt written to keep scrapers out with a broad disallow catches these crawlers too, and nothing announces that it has happened.

The second cause is inheritance. Plenty of hosts, security plugins and CDN configurations added AI crawler blocks by default during 2023 and 2024, and sites picked them up without anyone choosing it.

The third is a decision that was right at the time. A block added when the concern was training data now also prevents your pages being read for citation, which is a different trade.

The trade-off worth thinking about

There are two distinct things these crawlers do, and they are worth separating. Some fetch content to train models, which returns nothing to you directly. Others fetch pages to answer a question being asked right now, and cite the source.

Blocking the second kind removes you from answers your competitors will appear in. Blocking the first is a reasonable position for a publisher whose content is the product.

The user-agents are documented separately for exactly this reason, so you can allow the crawlers that cite and refuse the ones that only consume.

Does this matter in 2026?

It matters more each year that a larger share of research happens inside an assistant. A page that cannot be fetched cannot be cited, and there is no ranking report that will tell you it is happening.

The asymmetry is what makes this worth checking rather than assuming. Allowing a crawler costs nothing if you decide later to change your mind; being invisible for a year because of an inherited rule is expensive and invisible while it happens.

What this tool checks

It fetches your robots.txt and looks for rules that would prevent the major AI crawlers from reading your site, reporting which are blocked.

It reads the file as published, so a rule added by a plugin or a CDN shows up the same as one you wrote. If something is blocked that you did not intend, that is where to look first.

Where to go next

Crawl access is the first gate of several. Check whether search engines are blocked by the same file, review the robots.txt file as a whole, and confirm you publish an llms.txt file pointing at the pages worth reading.

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