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AI crawl checker

See which AI engines can read your site

One check across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and more: are they permitted by your robots.txt, can they get past your firewall, and is there actually content for them to read?

Check

Check AI access

Enter a URL to test permission, reachability, and readability for 10 AI engines.

Why sites disappear

The three ways sites lose AI traffic

Every page that's invisible to AI engines fails at one of three layers. The checker tests all three.

1. A robots.txt line nobody remembers

Plenty of sites still carry a robots.txt copied from a template years ago, or a blanket rule added during a redesign. One forgotten Disallow keeps GPTBot or ClaudeBot out of everything — silently, with no error anywhere. The bots simply never come back, and your content never shows up in their answers.

2. A firewall toggle you didn't know about

Cloudflare and similar services now offer one-click settings that challenge every known AI crawler. Useful if that's what you want — costly if you didn't know it was on. Your site looks fine in every browser while every AI engine gets a challenge page instead of your content. This is the failure that's invisible until someone checks.

3. Content that only exists after JavaScript

GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot don't execute JavaScript. If your site is a React, Vue or Lovable app, they receive the empty HTML shell — a page with your scripts and nothing to read. The bot was allowed in, reached the page, and found nothing. Pre-rendering serves those same bots the full HTML without changing your site.

The engines

Who's crawling, and what each bot decides

Each engine has its own bot, its own robots.txt token, and its own role in whether you get cited.

GPTBot
GPTBot

Collects training data for OpenAI's models. Blocking it keeps your content out of future ChatGPT knowledge.

Simulate GPTBot
ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User

Fetches pages live when ChatGPT users ask about them — this is the bot behind ChatGPT citations.

Simulate ChatGPT-User
ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot

Anthropic's crawler for Claude. Feeds both answers and model improvement.

Simulate ClaudeBot
PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot

Builds Perplexity's answer index. Perplexity cites sources on nearly every answer.

Simulate PerplexityBot
Google-Extended
Google-Extended

Not a crawler — a robots.txt switch that controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini.

Googlebot
Googlebot

Google Search and the source material for AI Overviews.

Simulate Googlebot
Bingbot
Bingbot

Powers Bing and grounds Microsoft Copilot's answers.

Simulate Bingbot
Grok (xAI)
Grok (xAI)

xAI's crawler for Grok answers on X.

Simulate Grok (xAI)
Meta AI
Meta AI

Meta's crawler for its AI assistants across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Simulate Meta AI
CCBot
CCBot

Common Crawl's bot. Its archive feeds many AI training sets, so its access ripples widely.

Simulate CCBot
Take control

Allow or block AI crawlers in robots.txt

Both directions are legitimate. What matters is that it's your decision, not a leftover default.

Allow AI crawlers

For sites that want citations, AI referrals, and presence in AI answers.

# Allow the major AI crawlers
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Allow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /

Block AI crawlers

Keeps your content out of AI answers and training sets while Googlebot and Bingbot stay allowed for search.

# Block AI crawlers (search engines stay allowed)
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

AI crawler questions, answered

What site owners ask most about ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity access.

Get started

Make your site readable to every AI engine

If the checker shows AI engines hitting an empty shell, Encited pre-renders your pages into full HTML for every crawler — no code changes, working in minutes.

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