AI Bot Access Checker
Check if AI search engines can actually access your site. Paste your URL and see your full robots.txt analysis in seconds.
Why your robots.txt needs an AI-era update
Search bots and training bots are not the same
Every major AI company runs at least two distinct crawlers. OpenAI has OAI-SearchBot (how you appear in ChatGPT search) and GPTBot (training data). Blocking the wrong one means disappearing from AI search entirely, or feeding your content into model training with no credit. Most robots.txt files treat them identically.
Cloudflare started blocking AI bots by default in July 2025
If your site uses Cloudflare and you have not explicitly allowed AI search crawlers, they are being blocked before they ever read your robots.txt. Millions of websites are invisible to AI search engines right now and do not know it. Source: MIT Technology Review
Your old robots.txt was written for Google, not AI
SEO-era robots.txt files often have wildcard disallow rules written to block scrapers. Those same rules now block OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. AI search visibility requires a deliberate update to a file most marketers have not touched in years.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does this tool check?
It fetches your robots.txt file and analyzes it against every known AI crawler. You see which AI search bots can access your content, which are blocked, and which training bots your content is or is not protected from. If your site uses Cloudflare, we flag that too.
What is the difference between AI search bots and training bots?
AI search bots (like OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot) are how your content appears in AI search results. You want to allow these. Training bots (like GPTBot and ClaudeBot) use your content to train AI models with no attribution or traffic back to you. Whether to block those is your choice.
Why is Cloudflare a problem for AI visibility?
Since July 2025, Cloudflare blocks all AI crawlers by default for new domains. This means even if your robots.txt is perfectly configured, Cloudflare may be intercepting AI search bots before they ever read it. If we detect Cloudflare on your site, we flag it prominently in your results.
My robots.txt looks fine. Why am I still not showing up in AI search?
robots.txt controls access but does not guarantee citations. Even with perfect bot access, AI platforms need enough structured, authoritative content to cite you confidently. Bot access is step one. Content structure, schema markup, and brand authority are what get you cited. The full AEO Quick Audit on our homepage checks all of that.
Should I block all AI bots?
No. Blocking AI search bots removes you from AI search results entirely. The right approach is to allow search and user-initiated bots, and decide separately whether to block training bots. Most businesses should allow search bots and make an informed choice about training bots.
What is the next step after fixing my robots.txt?
Once AI search bots can access your site, the next question is whether they are actually visiting and what content they are reading. The AI-Advisors platform tracks live AI bot traffic, shows which pages AI engines are indexing, and helps you optimize for citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI.
What is OAI-AdsBot, and does this tool check it?
OAI-AdsBot is OpenAI's dedicated crawler that validates landing pages submitted to ChatGPT Ads. It is separate from search, user-initiated, and training bots. As of 2026-04-30, this checker tests OAI-AdsBot accessibility too. If you run or plan to run ChatGPT Ads campaigns, your landing pages must let OAI-AdsBot through or ad validation will fail. See our OAI-AdsBot explainer for the full setup.