AI Crawler Checker

Free AI Crawler Checker — Analyze Your robots.txt for AI Search Visibility

Our free AI crawler checker fetches your live robots.txt file and analyzes it against 25 AI bot user agents across 10 platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Amazon Alexa, and Common Crawl. For each crawler it shows whether it is explicitly allowed, explicitly blocked, inheriting from wildcard rules, or not mentioned at all. The built-in Fix Generator produces a ready-to-paste robots.txt snippet to restore access to any AI search crawlers that are accidentally blocked.

Why AI Crawler Access Is the New SEO Blind Spot

Millions of websites are accidentally invisible to AI search engines — and Google Analytics will never show you why. When ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, or Claude answers a question, it pulls citations from pages that its crawlers have indexed. If your robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, or ClaudeBot, your content never enters those citation pools — even if your Google SEO is excellent. AI search traffic grew over 6,900% year-over-year in 2025 according to HUMAN Security telemetry. Sites that are not indexed by AI platforms are already losing meaningful referral traffic they cannot even see.

Training Crawlers vs Search Crawlers — A Critical Distinction

The single most important thing to understand about AI bots is that training crawlers and search crawlers are completely separate. GPTBot collects data to train future GPT models — blocking it has no effect on whether your content appears in ChatGPT Search results. OAI-SearchBot is what powers ChatGPT Search citations — blocking this removes you from AI search. Similarly, Google-Extended trains Gemini but has zero effect on Google Search rankings. Many website owners who blocked AI crawlers in 2023-2024 to protect their training data privacy unknowingly also blocked the search and citation crawlers, removing themselves from AI search results entirely. Our checker shows both categories clearly so you can make informed decisions.

How to Read Your AI Crawler Check Results

Results are grouped by platform and show one of five statuses. Explicitly Allowed means a specific User-agent rule grants access. Explicitly Blocked means a specific Disallow rule blocks the crawler. Allowed via wildcard means no specific rule exists but the wildcard User-agent: * rule allows crawling. Blocked via wildcard means the wildcard rule blocks this crawler — common on sites that used a blanket Disallow: / for all bots. Not Mentioned means no rule applies and the default (allow) is in effect. The AI Score at the top summarizes overall AI search visibility — a score of 100 means all search crawlers can access your content.

The Fix Generator — One-Click robots.txt Repair

After running a check, click Fix Generator to see a ready-to-paste robots.txt block that grants access to all AI search and citation crawlers that are currently blocked. The snippet is organized by platform with comments explaining each rule. Paste it into your robots.txt file above any broad Disallow directives. After updating, re-run this checker to confirm all search crawlers show as Allowed. For sites using WordPress, the robots.txt is typically managed through your SEO plugin such as Yoast or RankMath. For static sites, edit the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. After fixing your robots.txt, also run our SEO Audit Tool to check your overall on-page SEO health.

Which AI Crawlers Should You Allow vs Block?

The strategic approach depends on your goals. If you want maximum AI search visibility and referral traffic, allow all search and citation crawlers: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Bingbot, and DuckAssistBot. You can simultaneously block training-only crawlers if you want to opt out of AI model training: GPTBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Amazonbot, and CCBot. If you want to completely opt out of all AI systems for copyright or competitive reasons, block all bot categories. Our checker shows the canBlockSafely status for each crawler — if it is marked as safe to block, doing so will not affect your AI search citations.

Does Blocking AI Crawlers Protect Your Copyright?

Robots.txt is increasingly recognized as a valid machine-readable opt-out mechanism. The EU AI Act (2024) requires AI providers to document training data sources and respect copyright opt-outs. The EU Copyright Directive Article 4 establishes that text and data mining for commercial AI requires an opt-out mechanism — robots.txt is the de facto standard. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all publicly committed to respecting robots.txt directives. Blocking training crawlers like GPTBot is the primary mechanism to prevent your content from entering future AI training datasets. However, robots.txt is a voluntary protocol — for stronger protection, combine it with Cloudflare Bot Management or similar WAF enforcement. After setting up your robots.txt correctly, use our Robots.txt Generator if you need to build one from scratch.