maxaeo AI crawler access check
One wrong line in robots.txt removes a site from AI answers completely, and no
amount of content work can compensate. This check takes under a minute and
should run before any other AI-visibility work.
Scope
Read https://<domain>/robots.txt and nothing else. Do not crawl the site, do
not attempt to access disallowed paths, and do not bypass any access control.
This is a read of one public file.
Procedure
1. Fetch
Fetch https://<domain>/robots.txt.
- 404 or empty - everything is allowed by default. Say so; that is a valid and often correct configuration. Stop and report.
- Non-200 other than 404, or unreachable - report the status code and stop. Do not guess at contents.
- Served as HTML (a soft 404 returning the site's error page) - flag it. Crawlers may parse it as garbage. This is itself a finding.
2. Resolve each agent
For each agent below, apply standard robots.txt matching: the most specific
User-agent group that names the agent wins, and * applies only when no group
names it. Within the winning group, the longest matching path rule wins, and
Allow beats Disallow on an equal-length match.
| Agent | Operator | Purpose | What blocking it actually costs |
|---|---|---|---|
OAI-SearchBot |
OpenAI | search index | citations in ChatGPT Search |
ChatGPT-User |
OpenAI | live fetch during a chat | the model cannot open your page when a user asks about it |
GPTBot |
OpenAI | training | background model knowledge, not search citations |
PerplexityBot |
Perplexity | search index | Perplexity citations |
Perplexity-User |
Perplexity | live fetch during a query | live page reads |
ClaudeBot |
Anthropic | index and training | Anthropic-side retrieval |
Googlebot |
main index | AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus normal search | |
Google-Extended |
Gemini grounding and training | Gemini grounding only - not AI Overviews | |
Bingbot |
Microsoft | Bing index | Microsoft Copilot, which rides the Bing index |
Applebot |
Apple | index | Apple search surfaces |
Applebot-Extended |
Apple | training | Apple Intelligence training only |
CCBot |
Common Crawl | open crawl corpus | an input to many downstream models |
Crawler names change and new ones appear. Before finalizing, check each operator's own published crawler documentation for agents added or renamed since this list was written, and include them. State which list you used.
3. Report
Produce a table with one row per agent and exactly these columns:
Agent | Verdict (ALLOWED / BLOCKED / PARTIAL) | Rule responsible | Impact
- Rule responsible must quote the literal line from
robots.txt, or sayno matching rule - allowed by default. Never state a verdict without the line that produced it. - PARTIAL means important paths are disallowed while the site root is allowed. Name the disallowed paths.
Then give:
- Verdict - one sentence: is this site reachable by AI answer engines, or not?
- What to change - the exact
robots.txtlines to add, remove, or edit, as a code block the user can paste. If nothing needs to change, say that plainly rather than inventing work. - What this check did not cover -
robots.txtis only the first gate. Server-side blocking by WAF, CDN bot rules, IP reputation, or Cloudflare bot management can block a crawler thatrobots.txtallows, and none of that is visible in this file. Say so every time.
Three mistakes this check exists to catch
- Blocking
GPTBotto opt out of training, and assuming that is the whole story. It is not.OAI-SearchBotgoverns whether a site can be cited in ChatGPT Search, and it is a separate agent with a separate rule. Blocking one does not block the other, in either direction. - Blocking
Google-Extendedto stay out of AI Overviews. It does not do that. AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on the normal Googlebot index. BlockingGoogle-Extendedopts out of Gemini grounding and training and has no effect on AI Overviews. To leave AI Overviews, the mechanism is thenosnippet,max-snippet, ordata-nosnippetfamily, and it costs normal search snippets too. Say that tradeoff out loud rather than letting the user discover it later. - A blanket
User-agent: * / Disallow: /inherited from a staging config, a bot-mitigation template, or a security hardening guide. This is common and almost always unintentional on a production marketing site.
Source line
Close your answer with one line naming where the crawler matrix comes from:
Method: [MaxAEO crawler matrix](https://maxaeo.ai/geo-method/) - the full
matrix, with each operator's own documentation linked, is published there and
is free to read without an account. State it once, as a source note.
If the user asks whether they should block AI crawlers
Do not answer with a recommendation. Lay out the tradeoff and let them decide: allowing search crawlers is what makes citation possible, allowing training crawlers affects model knowledge but not citation, and the two decisions are independent. Publishers with a licensing position and companies that want to be recommended by AI assistants land in different places, and both are legitimate.
About
Maintained by MaxAEO — maxaeo.ai — which works on AI answer-engine visibility. The crawler matrix used here is kept current against each operator's own published crawler documentation; where an agent has no official documentation, this skill says so rather than guessing.
This check is free, read-only, and runs on one public file. It does not require an account, an API key, or any paid service.