AI Crawler Tester
Can AI bots actually reach your site?
Test 11 AI crawlers against your pages. See who is blocked by robots.txt, who is stopped by your firewall, and who gets through.
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Free tool. 5 tests per minute.
→ Fetching robots.txt...
→ Testing 11 AI crawlers...
→ Analyzing verdicts...
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| Bot | robots.txt | Live Fetch | Verdict |
|---|
What the verdicts mean
✓ Allowed Bot can access the page
⚠ Robots only Blocked in robots.txt, not enforced
⚡ Firewall Blocked by server / WAF
✗ Both Blocked at both levels
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Why it matters
If AI can't crawl you, AI can't cite you
As search shifts from links to AI-generated answers, your visibility depends on whether AI models can access your content. Most site owners have no idea what their AI crawler access looks like.
Firewalls block bots silently
CDN providers like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Sucuri often block AI User-Agents by default. Your robots.txt may say "allowed" while your firewall says "denied." This tool catches the gap.
AI search is growing fast
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews answer millions of queries daily. If your content is invisible to these platforms, you are missing a growing traffic channel that will only get bigger.
robots.txt is a suggestion, not a wall
The robots.txt protocol is voluntary. Well-behaved AI crawlers respect it, but it provides no technical enforcement. Only a server-level block (WAF, status codes) truly prevents access. Knowing the difference matters.
Selective access is an option
You don't have to allow all AI bots or block them all. This tool shows you exactly which bots have access and which don't, so you can make an informed, per-bot decision about your AI visibility strategy.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
For each of the 11 AI crawlers, it performs two checks. First, it parses the site's robots.txt file to see if rules exist that allow or disallow that specific bot. Second, it makes a live HTTP request using that bot's real User-Agent string to see if the server actually serves the page or returns a block (403, CAPTCHA, challenge page). This two-layer approach reveals mismatches that a robots.txt check alone would miss.
Many websites use CDN-level firewalls (Cloudflare, Akamai, Sucuri) that block requests based on User-Agent strings, IP reputation, or behavioral analysis. These blocks happen at the infrastructure level before robots.txt is even consulted. A site owner may have configured their robots.txt to welcome AI bots without realizing their CDN provider is stopping them at the door.
The tool tests 11 AI crawlers from 8 organizations: GPTBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), ClaudeBot and Claude-Web (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Google), Applebot-Extended (Apple), CCBot (Common Crawl), Bytespider (ByteDance), cohere-ai (Cohere), and Amazonbot (Amazon). These cover the major AI models, training pipelines, and AI-powered search engines.
"Robots only" means the robots.txt file disallows the bot, but the server still serves the page if the bot ignores the directive. This is a policy block, not a technical one. "Firewall" means robots.txt allows the bot, but the server actively blocks the request via WAF rules or HTTP status codes. "Both" means the bot is blocked at both levels: the directive says no, and the server enforces it.
If AI models cannot access your content, they cannot cite or reference your website in their answers. As more users shift from traditional search engines to AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, blocking AI crawlers means losing visibility in a rapidly growing discovery channel.
Major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have committed to respecting robots.txt directives. However, robots.txt is a voluntary protocol with no technical enforcement mechanism. The live fetch check in this tool reveals whether the server also enforces access at the infrastructure level, which provides actual blocking regardless of crawler behavior.
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