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Your robots.txt file tells AI bots how to treat your site.
If you ignore this file, AI bots decide for you.
Here are the main bots you need to know:
- GPTBot: Trains OpenAI models.
- OAI-SearchBot: Powers SearchGPT.
- ClaudeBot: Powers Anthropic AI.
- Google-Extended: Trains Gemini.
- Googlebot: Powers Google Search and AI Overviews.
- PerplexityBot: Powers Perplexity answers.
- Applebot-Extended: Trains Apple Intelligence.
- CCBot: Common Crawl training data.
You have three main choices:
Full Visibility. Allow all bots. AI finds you and trains on your data.
Search Only. Allow bots to cite you in answers. Stop them from training models.
Block AI. Block AI crawlers. Keep traditional search engines like Google and Bing.
Avoid these mistakes:
- Do not block Googlebot. You lose Google search traffic.
- Check your CDN. Cloudflare often blocks AI bots by default.
- Group your rules. Use one block per crawler.
How to test your setup:
- Use Google Search Console.
- Use curl in your terminal.
- Check Bing Webmaster Tools for errors.
Choose your path. Do it on purpose. Check your settings after every update.