How to Check GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot Crawl Access
Learn how robots.txt rules affect AI crawlers and how to check whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot are blocked from your public site.
A site can be perfectly visible to Googlebot and still use different rules for AI-specific crawlers. If you care about machine discovery, it is useful to inspect robots.txt for the user agents used by major AI companies and understand whether those rules apply to the whole site or only to specific paths.
Why user-agent-specific rules matter
robots.txt can contain a general User-agent: * block as well as separate sections for named crawlers. A broad Disallow: / under a matching user agent can block the entire site for that crawler even when ordinary search indexing remains available.
What to check
A quick technical review should inspect both the page and the discovery files around it.
- Whether the page itself is indexable.
- Whether robots.txt is reachable.
- Whether GPTBot is fully blocked.
- Whether ClaudeBot is fully blocked.
- Whether PerplexityBot is fully blocked.
- Whether the sitemap and canonical URL are available.
Crawler access is only a prerequisite
Allowing a crawler does not guarantee inclusion, ranking or citation. It only removes one possible technical barrier. Content usefulness, authority, internal linking and the behavior of each AI product still matter.
Quick workflow
- Run the AI Visibility Checker on a public URL.
- Review the crawler access checks.
- Open robots.txt and confirm the exact matching user-agent rules.
- Decide whether the current policy matches your business and privacy goals.
- Re-run the check after changing robots.txt.
FAQ
Should I allow every AI crawler?
That is a policy decision, not a universal SEO rule. Consider your content strategy, licensing and privacy goals.
Does blocking GPTBot remove my site from Google?
GPTBot is separate from Googlebot. Search visibility and AI crawler policies are not the same thing.
Can a robots.txt checker guarantee crawler behavior?
No. It can interpret published rules, but individual services decide how they crawl and use content.
Bottom line
Check crawler access deliberately instead of assuming every bot sees the same site. Open AI Visibility Checker.