Should You Block AI Crawlers? A Founder’s Decision Guide
Separate model training, AI-search discovery, user-requested retrieval, and private access before choosing crawler rules or enforcement.
Tagged collection
Latest articles tagged “robots-txt”
Open an article for the complete method, evidence, limitations, and a focused reader discussion.
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ChatGPT-User and robots.txt: What Publishers Can Actually Control
Separate ChatGPT user-triggered visits from OpenAI search crawling and training crawling, then apply the right robots, firewall, and access controls to each job.
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Robots.txt Is 200 but Unreachable to Google: A Network Diagnostic
Diagnose a crawler-facing robots.txt failure across DNS, IPv4 and IPv6, TLS, CDN, WAF, redirects, and origin logs instead of trusting one browser request.
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AI crawlers explained: Which bots index, train on, or fetch your website
A publisher’s guide to Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot, Amazonbot and other documented crawlers—what each one does, which controls it respects, and how to prepare a website for AI search without confusing crawling with citation.
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Google-Extended Can Exclude Pages from Vertex AI Grounding Without Blocking Google Search
Use Google-Extended as a robots.txt control token for specified Gemini training and grounding uses while keeping Google Search crawling and ranking separate.
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Search, Agent and Training Bots: A Practical Access Policy for Publishers
Build a crawler policy by purpose and named bot, with separate controls for search discovery, user-directed agents, training, verification, and server protection.
