Has anyone actually configured robots.txt for AI crawlers? The guidance online is all over the place

I manage robots.txt for about 40 enterprise sites. Here’s the breakdown that actually matters:

Tier 1 - Must Configure:

• GPTBot - OpenAI’s training crawler
• ChatGPT-User - ChatGPT’s browsing mode
• ClaudeBot - Anthropic’s crawler
• Google-Extended - Google Gemini training
• PerplexityBot - Perplexity’s index

Tier 2 - Worth Considering:

• anthropic-ai - Secondary Anthropic crawler
• OAI-SearchBot - OpenAI’s search indexer
• CCBot - Common Crawl (used by many AI companies)

What we do:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /blog/
Allow: /resources/
Disallow: /pricing/
Disallow: /admin/

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Key insight: PerplexityBot is the one I always allow fully because it actually cites your pages with links. Blocking it is shooting yourself in the foot for zero benefit.

We made a huge mistake blocking all AI crawlers last year based on “content protection” advice.

What happened:

• Organic traffic stayed the same (Google doesn’t care about AI crawler blocks)
• But our clients started asking “why don’t we show up when I ask ChatGPT about our industry?”
• Competitors who allowed crawlers were getting mentioned constantly

We’ve now reversed course and allow all major AI crawlers. The “protection” argument made no sense once we realized:

1. Training data was already collected
2. Blocking real-time access just makes us invisible
3. There’s no evidence blocking prevents any actual harm

The only exception is truly proprietary content behind authentication - and those pages were already disallowed.

Different perspective from heavily regulated industry (healthcare tech).

We have legitimate reasons to control AI access to certain content:

• Patient-related documentation
• Internal process documents that accidentally got indexed
• Pricing and contract terms

Our approach:

We created a tiered system:

1. Public marketing content - Allow all AI crawlers
2. Product documentation - Allow, but monitor via Am I Cited what’s being cited
3. Sensitive business content - Disallow all crawlers
4. Internal pages - Disallow plus authentication

The key is being intentional. “Block everything” and “allow everything” are both lazy approaches. Map your content, understand what each type should do for you, then configure accordingly.

Pro tip that took me way too long to figure out:

Test your robots.txt with actual crawler user-agents.

I thought I had everything configured correctly until I checked our server logs and saw that some AI crawlers weren’t matching our rules because I had typos in the user-agent names.

“GPT-Bot” is not the same as “GPTBot” - guess which one I had wrong for 3 months?

Use Google’s robots.txt tester or command line tools to verify each rule actually matches what you expect.

Here’s my standard recommendation for most businesses:

Allow by default, restrict strategically.

The businesses that benefit from blocking are rare edge cases:

• Premium content publishers worried about summarization
• Companies with truly proprietary technical content
• Organizations in legal disputes about AI training

For everyone else, the calculus is simple: AI visibility is a growing traffic source. Perplexity alone drives 200M+ monthly queries. Being invisible there is a strategic disadvantage.

My standard config for clients:

# Allow all AI crawlers to public content
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

# Restrict sensitive areas
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /internal/
Disallow: /api/

One thing nobody mentions: monitoring what actually happens after you configure.

I set up alerts for AI bot traffic in our analytics. Noticed some interesting patterns:

• GPTBot hits us ~500 times/day
• PerplexityBot around ~200 times/day
• ClaudeBot surprisingly less frequent, maybe ~50/day

This data helps me understand which AI platforms are actually indexing our content. Combined with tools that track AI citations, I can see the full picture of allow robots.txt > AI crawling > AI citations.

Without this monitoring, you’re just guessing about impact.

Publisher perspective here. We run a news/analysis site with 10k+ articles.

What we learned the hard way:

Blocking AI crawlers hurt us in unexpected ways:

1. Our articles stopped appearing in AI-generated summaries for industry topics
2. Competitors who allowed crawlers became the “authoritative source”
3. When people asked ChatGPT about our coverage, it said it couldn’t access our content

The “protection” argument assumes AI is stealing your content. In reality, AI is citing and driving traffic to content it can access. Blocking just means you’re not part of that conversation.

We now allow all AI crawlers and use Am I Cited to monitor how we’re being cited. Our AI referral traffic is up 340% since we made the switch.

This thread has been incredibly helpful. Summary of what I’m implementing based on everyone’s feedback:

Immediate changes:

1. Allow all major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) to public content
2. Explicitly disallow sensitive paths (/admin, /internal, /pricing for now)
3. Fix the typos in our current config (embarrassing but necessary)

Monitoring setup: 4. Add server log tracking for AI bot traffic 5. Set up Am I Cited to track actual citations 6. Review in 30 days to see impact

The key insight for me was that blocking doesn’t protect content already in training data - it just limits future visibility. And since AI search is growing rapidly, visibility matters more than “protection.”

Thanks everyone for the real-world configurations and experiences.