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Technical AEO Guide

Can AI crawlers access your website?

Understand AI crawler access, robots.txt rules and what allowing or blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other crawlers can mean for your site.

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Quick answer

AI crawler access is controlled partly through robots.txt and other website directives, but each provider can use different crawlers for training, search, user-triggered retrieval, or indexing. Allowing a crawler does not guarantee inclusion in an AI answer, and blocking one crawler does not necessarily remove information already available elsewhere.

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Be understandable

Give AI retrieval systems clear facts, relationships, and structured context.

Measure evidence

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Know what your robots file says

A robots.txt file can allow or disallow crawler access to paths on your public website. Rules should protect private application areas while keeping public discovery pages available when that matches your policy.

  • Allow public marketing and educational pages
  • Block private dashboards and admin routes
  • Keep sitemap locations discoverable

Different bots have different purposes

Providers may operate separate bots for model training, search indexing, or user-triggered browsing. Policies and user-agent names can change over time.

  • Review provider documentation periodically
  • Do not assume one crawler represents an entire platform
  • Treat access rules as one visibility layer, not the whole strategy

Test the real configuration

Rofix's free AI Crawler Checker can inspect a public site's robots directives so you can catch accidental blocks quickly.

  • Check major AI crawler directives
  • Review conflicting rules
  • Fix accidental blanket disallows

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Related Rofix resources

AI Crawler CheckerAnswer Readiness CheckerLLM VisibilityAnswer Engine Optimization

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