// visibility · ai crawler robots auditor

Which AI bots can
read your site?

12 AI crawlers checked against your robots.txt in one scan. See which are allowed, which are blocked, and which rules cause each outcome.

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Try: vishkul.com nytimes.com techcrunch.com
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Per-crawler breakdown
Crawler Made by Type Status Via rule

What this tool checks

Paste a URL and this tool fetches that site's robots.txt and checks it against 12 named AI crawlers, one by one. For each crawler it reports whether the file allows or blocks it, and which specific rule line is responsible, so you can see exactly what your robots.txt is telling AI systems right now.

Not all AI crawlers do the same job, so the tool groups them into three kinds.

Why it matters for AI visibility

If an inference crawler is blocked, the assistant it belongs to cannot fetch your page when someone asks a related question, so you cannot be cited or quoted in that answer, no matter how good the content is. One honest caveat: robots.txt is a request, not a lock. Compliant crawlers respect it, but nothing forces any bot to obey it, so treat this as a strong signal of intent, not a guarantee of behavior.

Frequently asked questions

Should I block AI crawlers in robots.txt?

That depends on your goals. Blocking training crawlers (CCBot) is common and has no impact on AI search visibility. Blocking inference crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) means those AI engines cannot read your pages when generating answers, which reduces your chance of being cited. Blocking Googlebot-related crawlers like Google-Extended affects whether Google's AI overview can reference your content.

What is the difference between a training crawler and an inference crawler?

Training crawlers collect data to train AI models (CCBot for Common Crawl, used by many LLMs). Inference crawlers fetch pages at query time to produce answers (GPTBot for ChatGPT, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, ClaudeBot for Claude). Blocking training crawlers prevents future model training. Blocking inference crawlers prevents the AI from citing your page in live answers.

Does a User-agent: * block stop all AI crawlers?

Yes, if the Disallow rule covers the paths you care about. User-agent: * with Disallow: / blocks all crawlers, including all AI bots, from reading your entire site. Some sites use this accidentally, or inherit it from old WordPress defaults.

Is this robots.txt check the same as what crawlers actually do?

This tool reads the robots.txt file and reports the stated rules. In practice, compliance is voluntary. Most major AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) say they respect robots.txt, but nothing enforces it. The tool tells you what the file says, not whether every crawler obeys it.