Should I allow AI crawlers on my site?

For most marketing sites, yes. Blocking them protects your content from being used but also removes you from AI-generated answers where competitors will still be cited. Publishers who sell content have a genuine reason to block; service businesses usually do not.

How do I see which AI crawlers visit my site?

Check server or CDN logs for user agents such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot. Rising AI crawler activity on specific pages is one of the few direct signals available that your content is being retrieved for answers.

GEO & AI Search

AI Crawler

An AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company to collect or retrieve web content for training or for answering live queries, such as OpenAI's GPTBot, Google-Extended, and Anthropic's ClaudeBot.

Site owners can allow or block these in robots.txt, which controls whether their content can feed and be cited by AI systems. Blocking them protects content but can also remove a brand from AI answers. Deciding which to allow is now part of technical SEO strategy.

The choice is not binary, since robots.txt allows path-level rules. A publisher can permit crawling of marketing and reference content while blocking an archive it licenses, and that is usually a more sensible position than a site-wide decision either way. Bear in mind that different bots serve different purposes for the same company: one may gather training data while another fetches pages live to answer a question. Blocking the second removes you from answers today, which is a heavier cost than blocking the first. Check which agent does what before writing the rules.

Example

A publisher's log for one week: GPTBot 3,100 requests, ClaudeBot 1,800, PerplexityBot 900, mostly hitting guides. The team blocks training crawlers on the licensed archive path but leaves marketing content open. A month later Perplexity cites the firm's pricing guide in answers about agency costs: the crawl traffic was the pipeline, and cutting all of it would have cut the citations too.

Frequently asked questions

Should I allow AI crawlers on my site?: For most marketing sites, yes. Blocking them protects your content from being used but also removes you from AI-generated answers where competitors will still be cited. Publishers who sell content have a genuine reason to block; service businesses usually do not.
How do I see which AI crawlers visit my site?: Check server or CDN logs for user agents such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot. Rising AI crawler activity on specific pages is one of the few direct signals available that your content is being retrieved for answers.

Related terms

Crawling Robots.txt llms.txt

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