Skip to main content
Guide

How to Check Whether AI Crawlers Can Access Your Site

If a search-style AI crawler cannot fetch your page, it cannot cite it. Here is how to check, in five steps.

The short answer

Check five things: your robots.txt rules, your firewall or CDN bot settings, whether the page is indexed and snippet-eligible, whether the main text renders without scripts, and your server logs. Sources: OpenAI crawler documentation; Google Search Central.

Get a Free AI Visibility Audit → Open the GEO checklist

Last updated November 14, 2026 · Written by the Inspire Clicks senior team

Executive brief

What this means for your leadership team

Risk and revenue

For the CEO

If AI search crawlers cannot reach your site, your brand cannot be cited, whatever else you invest in. This is the cheapest check to run first.

Pipeline and reporting

For the CMO

Ask your team to confirm crawler access before any content or PR spend, and to report the result in one line.

Delivery and governance

For the Head of Digital

Five ordered checks cover robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules, indexation and rendering. The robots.txt example below is a starting point, not a drop-in file.

Want this assessed for your brand? Get a free AI visibility audit →

Reference

The crawlers that matter

The crawlers that matter
CrawlerVendor and purposeTypical decision
GooglebotGoogle Search, AI Overviews and AI ModeAllow
OAI-SearchBotOpenAI: ChatGPT search resultsAllow to be eligible for ChatGPT search
ChatGPT-UserOpenAI: user-initiated page fetchesAllow
GPTBotOpenAI: model trainingLicensing decision, separate from search
PerplexityBotPerplexity: search indexAllow to be retrievable. Check vendor docs
Claude-SearchBot, Claude-UserAnthropic: search retrieval and user fetchesAllow to be retrievable. Check vendor docs
ClaudeBotAnthropic: model trainingLicensing decision, separate from search

Names and behavior change. Confirm against each vendor's current documentation before editing rules.

Want the check run for you?

We test crawler access, indexation and rendering as part of the free audit.

Get a Free AI Visibility Audit →
Steps

Five checks, in order

  1. 1. Read your robots.txt

    Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for Disallow: / under User-agent: * or under the bots above. A blanket disallow blocks everything. Also check that your sitemap line is present.

  2. 2. Check your firewall and CDN

    Many sites allow bots in robots.txt but block them in a WAF, CDN bot-management rule or security plugin. Review bot or rate-limit rules, and use each vendor's published IP ranges rather than trusting the user-agent text alone.

  3. 3. Confirm indexation and snippet eligibility

    In Google Search Console, inspect your key URLs. They should be indexed and not carry noindex or nosnippet unless you chose that deliberately. Google says pages need to be indexed and snippet-eligible to appear in AI features.

  4. 4. Check that the text is in the HTML

    View the page source. If the main text only appears after scripts run, some crawlers will see an empty page. Server-side or pre-rendered content is safer for key pages.

  5. 5. Look at your server logs

    Search logs or CDN analytics for the crawler names above. Check that requests succeed with 200 responses and are not blocked, redirected in loops or rate limited. Verify suspicious traffic against published IP ranges.

FAQ

Questions

No. Access is a prerequisite, not a guarantee. AI tools also need content that is clear, relevant and corroborated elsewhere.

No. OpenAI documents separate crawlers: OAI-SearchBot for search, GPTBot for training and ChatGPT-User for user-initiated fetches. Blocking one does not block the others. Check OpenAI's current documentation.

No. Google says AI features use the same indexing and snippet eligibility as Search, with no extra requirements.

Next step

Make sure AI can fetch your pages

Start with the free audit, which begins with retrieval access.

Get a Free AI Visibility Audit → Read the LLM citations guide

We reply within 24 hours. Month-to-month terms, 30 days' notice, no lock-in.

Keep exploring

Explore the whole AI Visibility Hub

Understand the shift

Services and programs

By sector

Guides and reporting

AI Visibility Hub home · AI Search services · Contact us