AI Crawler Access Analysis Skill

Purpose

This skill analyzes a website's accessibility to AI crawlers -- the bots that AI companies use to discover, index, and train on web content. If AI crawlers are blocked, the site's content cannot appear in AI-generated responses regardless of its quality. Crawler access is the foundational technical requirement for GEO.

Key Insight

As of early 2026, many websites inadvertently block AI crawlers through overly aggressive robots.txt rules, inherited from legacy SEO configurations. An Originality.ai 2025 study found that over 35% of the top 1,000 websites block at least one major AI crawler, and 5-10% block all AI crawlers. Blocking AI crawlers is the single fastest way to become invisible in AI-generated search results.

Complete AI Crawler Reference

Tier 1: Critical for AI Search Visibility (RECOMMEND: ALLOW)

These crawlers power the AI search products where users actively look for answers. Blocking them directly reduces your visibility in AI-generated responses.

GPTBot

• Operator: OpenAI
• User-Agent: GPTBot
• Full User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)
• Purpose: Fetches content for ChatGPT's web browsing, plugins, and search features. Content accessed by GPTBot may be used to improve OpenAI models.
• Impact of Blocking: Content will NOT appear in ChatGPT Search results or be accessible when users ask ChatGPT to browse the web. This is the highest-impact AI crawler to allow.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- ChatGPT has 300M+ weekly active users as of 2025. Blocking GPTBot removes your content from one of the largest AI search surfaces.

OAI-SearchBot

• Operator: OpenAI
• User-Agent: OAI-SearchBot
• Full User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://docs.openai.com/bots/overview)
• Purpose: Specifically powers ChatGPT's search feature. Unlike GPTBot, content accessed by OAI-SearchBot is NOT used for model training -- only for live search results.
• Impact of Blocking: Content will not appear in ChatGPT's search results even if GPTBot is allowed.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- This is a search-only crawler with no training implications. There is no strategic reason to block it.

ChatGPT-User

• Operator: OpenAI
• User-Agent: ChatGPT-User
• Full User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot)
• Purpose: Used when a ChatGPT user explicitly asks the model to visit a specific URL. Acts like a browser agent on behalf of the user.
• Impact of Blocking: ChatGPT cannot visit your pages when users ask it to read or summarize them. This prevents direct user-initiated traffic.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Blocking this bot prevents users who are actively trying to engage with your content from accessing it through ChatGPT.

ClaudeBot

• Operator: Anthropic
• User-Agent: ClaudeBot
• Full User-Agent String: ClaudeBot/1.0; +https://www.anthropic.com/claude-bot
• Purpose: Fetches web content for Claude's features including web search, citations, and analysis tools.
• Impact of Blocking: Content will not be accessible to Claude for web search or when users ask Claude to analyze specific URLs.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Claude is a major AI assistant with growing market share. Blocking ClaudeBot reduces your AI search footprint.

PerplexityBot

• Operator: Perplexity AI
• User-Agent: PerplexityBot
• Full User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
• Purpose: Powers Perplexity's AI search engine, which provides sourced answers with direct citations and links back to source pages.
• Impact of Blocking: Content will not appear in Perplexity search results. Perplexity is one of the best referral traffic sources among AI search products because it always displays source links.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Perplexity drives actual referral traffic and always attributes sources. High-value AI crawler for publishers and businesses.

Tier 2: Important for Broader AI Ecosystem (RECOMMEND: ALLOW)

These crawlers serve large AI platforms or search ecosystems. Allowing them increases your content's reach.

Google-Extended

• Operator: Google
• User-Agent: Google-Extended
• Purpose: Controls whether Google uses your content for Gemini model training and AI Overviews improvement. CRITICAL NOTE: Blocking Google-Extended does NOT affect your Google Search rankings or your appearance in Google Search results. That is controlled by the standard Googlebot.
• Impact of Blocking: Content may not be used for Gemini training or to improve AI Overviews. However, your content can still appear in AI Overviews based on standard search indexing.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Blocking provides minimal content protection upside while reducing your presence in Google's AI features. Since it does not affect standard search ranking, the only reason to block is philosophical objection to training data usage.

GoogleOther

• Operator: Google
• User-Agent: GoogleOther
• Purpose: Used by Google for various non-search-ranking purposes including research, one-off crawls, and AI-related data collection.
• Impact of Blocking: Minimal impact on search rankings. May reduce presence in Google's AI research and experimental features.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Low risk, moderate potential benefit for AI feature inclusion.

Applebot-Extended

• Operator: Apple
• User-Agent: Applebot-Extended
• Purpose: Used by Apple to train and improve Apple Intelligence features, Siri, and Apple's AI products. Separate from standard Applebot (which powers Siri search and Spotlight Suggestions).
• Impact of Blocking: Content may not be used in Apple Intelligence features. Standard Siri and Spotlight functionality is unaffected (controlled by Applebot).
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Apple Intelligence is integrated into all Apple devices (2B+ active devices). Presence in Apple's AI features has growing strategic value.

Amazonbot

• Operator: Amazon
• User-Agent: Amazonbot
• Full User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot)
• Purpose: Indexes content for Alexa answers and Amazon's AI features.
• Impact of Blocking: Content will not appear in Alexa voice responses or Amazon's AI-powered search features.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Relevant for voice search optimization. Lower priority than Tier 1 crawlers but no downside to allowing.

FacebookBot

• Operator: Meta
• User-Agent: FacebookBot
• Purpose: Used by Meta for AI features across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Meta AI assistant.
• Impact of Blocking: Content may not be accessible to Meta AI. Link previews on Facebook/Instagram are handled by a different crawler and are unaffected.
• Recommendation: ALLOW -- Meta AI is embedded in apps with 3B+ combined users. Growing importance for AI visibility.

Tier 3: Training-Only Crawlers (ALLOW or BLOCK Based on Strategy)

These crawlers are primarily used for AI model training rather than live search features. Blocking them does not affect AI search visibility.

CCBot

• Operator: Common Crawl (nonprofit)
• User-Agent: CCBot
• Full User-Agent String: CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
• Purpose: Builds the Common Crawl dataset, which is used as training data by many AI companies (Google, Meta, Stability AI, and others).