How to Check (and Control) Which AI Bots Are Crawling Your Site

Right now, while you're reading this, there's a decent chance a bot you've never heard of is working through your pages — reading your content, storing it, and quietly feeding it into an AI model somewhere. You didn't invite it. You may not even know its name. And whether that's a good thing or a problem depends entirely on choices most site owners have never made on purpose.

The rise of AI assistants has flooded the web with a new class of crawlers, and figuring out which AI bots are crawling your site — then deciding which ones you actually want there — has quietly become part of the job. The good news is you have far more control than you think, and checking your current setup takes minutes.

Meet the bots knocking on your door

Not all crawlers are the same, and lumping them together is the first mistake. Googlebot indexes your site for regular search results — that's the one you almost certainly want. The newer wave is different: these bots fetch your content to train AI models or to answer questions inside chat tools.

The names worth knowing are GPTBot from OpenAI, ClaudeBot from Anthropic, Google-Extended for Google's AI training, PerplexityBot for the Perplexity answer engine, and CCBot from Common Crawl, whose dataset feeds countless downstream models. Each has its own user-agent, and each can be allowed or blocked independently — which is exactly where your control begins.

Step one: see who currently has access

Before you change anything, find out where you stand today. Most site owners have never audited this, which means they're either wide open to every AI crawler or accidentally blocking the ones they'd actually want — usually without realizing which.

The fastest way to get a clear answer is to run your domain through the AI Crawler Access Checker, which tells you in seconds whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and CCBot are allowed or disallowed by your current rules. It turns a fuzzy "I think we're fine" into a definite yes or no for each bot.

It's also worth looking at your robots.txt with fresh eyes to catch anything unexpected. The Robots.txt Tester lets you check whether a specific bot and URL combination is permitted, so you can spot an overly broad Disallow that's quietly locking out more than you intended.

Step two: decide what you actually want

Here's where it stops being technical and starts being strategic. There's no universally correct answer — it depends on what your site is and what you're trying to get out of it.

If you want to appear in AI answers, get cited by chat assistants, and pick up the brand mentions and referral traffic that come with it, you'll want to keep the major AI bots welcome. Being crawlable is the price of admission to that entire channel — block the bots and you simply don't exist there.

If your priority is protecting original content, proprietary data, or anything you don't want absorbed into a training set, blocking specific AI crawlers is a legitimate call. The key distinction to hold onto: blocking GPTBot or CCBot has no effect on your normal Google Search rankings, because Googlebot is a separate crawler with separate rules. You can shut the door on AI training while staying fully indexed in search.

Step three: put the rules in place

Once you've decided, implementing it is straightforward. Control lives primarily in your robots.txt file, where you add a block for each bot's user-agent along with what it's allowed to do.

To block a crawler entirely, you give it its own User-agent line followed by a Disallow rule for the whole site. To welcome one, you allow it explicitly. If hand-writing these rules makes you nervous, generate a clean starting point with the Robots.txt Generator, then adjust the individual bot directives to match the decisions you made in step two.

A few practical tips as you build it out:

• Be specific with user-agents. A rule aimed at GPTBot only affects GPTBot — it won't touch ClaudeBot or Googlebot. Handle each crawler you care about explicitly rather than assuming one rule covers them all.
• Test before you trust. A single misplaced Disallow can block far more than intended. Re-run the checker after every edit.
• Don't overreach. Blocking every unknown bot feels safe but can accidentally shut out legitimate services you'd actually want, from social preview fetchers to search crawlers.

Understand the limits of robots.txt

One honest caveat, because it matters: robots.txt is a polite request, not a locked gate. Reputable crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot respect it, but a badly behaved scraper can simply ignore the file and crawl anyway.

If you're dealing with genuinely unwanted or abusive bots — not the mainstream AI crawlers, but aggressive scrapers hammering your server — robots.txt won't stop them. For that you need enforcement at the server or firewall level, blocking by user-agent or IP so the requests never get served in the first place. Robots.txt handles the well-mannered majority; hard blocking handles the rest.

Go one step further with llms.txt

Controlling access is the defensive half of the equation. The offensive half is making it easy for the AI tools you do welcome to understand your site accurately — and that's where a newer standard comes in.

An llms.txt file is a plain-text guide, similar in spirit to robots.txt, that tells AI assistants what your site is about and which pages carry your most important content. Spin one up with the llms.txt Generator. It won't force a citation, but it helps the models you've allowed in represent you correctly instead of guessing — and it's fast becoming a standard signal that a site is AI-ready.

Make it a habit, not a one-off

New AI crawlers appear regularly, and the rules of engagement are still shifting month to month. A setup that's perfectly tuned today can be missing the newest important bot six months from now, so a quick re-check every quarter keeps you current.

The real takeaway is about ownership. For most of the web's history, site owners never thought about which non-search bots visited them — now that choice carries real weight for visibility, traffic, and how your work gets used. Spend ten minutes deciding on purpose which AI bots are crawling your site, put the rules in writing, and you turn a channel you were ignoring into one you actually control.