AEO Engine free tool
The AI Bot Robots.txt Checker fetches your domain's robots.txt, parses every user-agent directive, and maps them against 20+ known AI crawlers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, and more. It groups bots by purpose — training vs. retrieval — detects wildcard shadow blocks from User-agent: * rules, validates syntax, and generates a recommended AI-optimized robots.txt snippet.
Who this tool is for: Built for SEO teams, developers, founders, and marketers who need to know whether their robots.txt accidentally blocks AI crawlers from citing their content — and what to fix. Use it before launching a site, after a migration, when AI visibility drops, or when a dev team adds blanket disallow rules that quietly block ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews — cite sources they can crawl. If your robots.txt blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, or PerplexityBot, your content cannot appear in those answers. With 25% of the top 1,000 websites now blocking GPTBot, many brands are invisible in AI search without realizing it. A single line in robots.txt can quietly block ChatGPT from ever reading your content.
AEO Engine turns checker findings into managed AI-visibility execution: robots.txt and llms.txt optimization, schema implementation, answer-ready content creation, internal linking architecture, third-party citation campaigns, and ongoing AI-visibility dashboards. The checker diagnoses the gaps; we ship the fixes.
Competitor tools like Pixelmojo, LLM Pulse, RankPrompt, CrawlerCheck, and Nuxt SEO offer AI bot checking but typically with email gates, smaller bot coverage, no training-vs-retrieval taxonomy, and no wildcard shadow analysis. AEO Engine's checker is free, instant, covers 20+ bots with purpose grouping, and connects the diagnostic to a managed AI visibility execution path.
Allow retrieval/search bots (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) to appear in AI search citations. Consider blocking training-only bots (ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai) to prevent your content from training AI models without losing search visibility.
A shadow block happens when a wildcard rule (User-agent: *) disallows crawling for all bots, and a specific AI bot has no explicit rule overriding it. The AI bot inherits the block even though you may not have intended to block it. Our tool flags these so you can add explicit rules for the bots you want to allow.
No. Blocking GPTBot has zero impact on Google Search rankings. GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT, not Google's search index. However, blocking GPTBot prevents your content from being cited in ChatGPT responses.
Use separate rules: allow retrieval bots (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) for AI search visibility, while blocking training bots (ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent). This gives you AI citations without feeding training pipelines.
Yes. Robots.txt is a voluntary protocol. Malicious scrapers may ignore it entirely. For stronger protection, supplement robots.txt with server-level blocking, Web Application Firewall rules, IP blocking, and rate limiting. Our checker helps you manage well-behaved AI crawlers — it is not a security tool.
Check which AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and 20+ more) can access your site. Free, instant, no email gate. Fix accidental AI blocks.
Check AI bot access