NEWv1.17: Audited & Actionable
Qwairy
Technical

robots.txt

Text file placed at the root of a website to indicate to indexing robots which pages to explore or avoid.

What is robots.txt?

The robots.txt file is a web standard that allows site owners to communicate with indexing robots (crawlers). It indicates which parts of the site can or cannot be explored. In the context of GEO, it's crucial to configure robots.txt to allow AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.) to access your content, unless you have legal or strategic reasons to block them.

How Qwairy Makes This Actionable

Qwairy analyzes your robots.txt file to verify AI crawler accessibility. Our crawlability analysis checks if GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and other AI crawlers can access your content, identifying any blocking rules that might prevent AI visibility.

Frequently Asked Questions

For most businesses, allow AI crawlers. Blocking them prevents your content from appearing in AI responses and training data, essentially making you invisible in the AI search ecosystem. Only block if you have legal concerns (copyrighted content), competitive concerns (proprietary data), or want to negotiate commercial AI licensing deals. The default should be: allow, unless you have specific reasons not to.

Key AI crawler user agents include: GPTBot (OpenAI/ChatGPT), Google-Extended (Google Gemini training), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), CCBot (Common Crawl, used by many AI companies), PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, and Applebot-Extended. GEO platforms provide comprehensive lists and check if each is properly configured in your robots.txt file.

No, AI crawler rules are separate from traditional SEO crawler rules (Googlebot, Bingbot). You can block GPTBot without affecting Googlebot. Note that AI Overviews are powered by standard Google Search crawling (Googlebot), so blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from AI Overviews; it only controls Gemini training and grounding. GEO platforms help you balance these considerations by analyzing which crawlers to allow or block based on your strategy.
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Related Terms

AI Crawler

Technical

Indexing robot used by AI companies to collect data intended to train or feed their models.

llms.txt

Technical

Proposed file format offering a structured summary of a site's content to optimize its understanding by LLMs.

GPTBot

Technical

OpenAI's web crawler that collects public web content to train future GPT models; site owners control its access via robots.txt.

ClaudeBot

Technical

Anthropic's web crawler that collects public web content to train and improve Claude models; site owners control its access via robots.txt.

Crawlability

Technical

How easily search engine and AI crawlers like GPTBot or ClaudeBot can access, navigate, and index a website's content.

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AI architecture that retrieves relevant information from external sources in real-time before generating responses.

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Techniques aimed at improving a website's ranking in traditional search engine results.

← Back to GlossaryLast updated Jun 9, 2026