In 2026, artificial intelligence web crawlers scan billions of web pages daily to train large language models (LLMs) and power AI retrieval systems. While traditional search crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot index your pages to send organic traffic, many AI scrapers consume your bandwidth and train commercial generative models on your proprietary content without sending referral visitors.
The Smart SEO AI Bot Blocker & Robots.txt Generator allows content publishers, bloggers, and e-commerce stores to granularly permit or deny AI scraping bots without risking organic Google rankings or sitemap indexing.
| Crawler User-Agent | Organization | Primary Function | Recommended Policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Scrapes content to train GPT-4o, GPT-5, and future models | Disallow if protecting copyrighted IP |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Real-time browsing when users ask ChatGPT to check a URL | Allow to get ChatGPT citation traffic |
| ClaudeBot / Claude-Web | Anthropic | Crawling web data for Claude training & real-time research | Disallow (training) |
| Google-Extended | Trains Gemini and Vertex AI without affecting Google Search | Webmaster Choice (Safe to block without losing SEO ranks) | |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity AI | Powers conversational answers and citations in Perplexity AI | Allow for generative search traffic |
| ByteSpider | ByteDance / TikTok | Aggressive crawler training Doubao and ByteDance LLMs | Disallow (High crawl rate) |
| CCBot | Common Crawl | Open-source dataset scraper heavily mined by multiple AI startups | Disallow |
A frequent mistake webmasters make is blocking User-agent: Googlebot. Blocking Googlebot will de-index your entire site from Google Search! Instead, Google introduced User-agent: Google-Extended specifically so publishers can opt out of Gemini AI training while remaining 100% visible and rankable in Google Search and Google Discover.
/admin/).https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt).