Configuring robots.txt for AI search engines means deciding, per bot, whether your content can be crawled and cited — with rules for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended.
robots.txt is the standard file site owners use to tell bots what they may access. For AI engines, it controls whether your content enters their crawl and citation loop. The configuration is a business decision: allow AI bots to gain citation and referral potential, or block them to control how your content is used. The robots.txt for AI access guide covers the implementation in detail.
What Are the Main AI Bot User-Agents?
The main AI bots are GPTBot and ChatGPT-User from OpenAI, PerplexityBot from Perplexity, ClaudeBot and anthropic-ai from Anthropic, and Google-Extended from Google. Each can be allowed or blocked independently with its own user-agent rule. The AI crawlers comparison identifies each bot and what it does.
How Do You Allow AI Bots to Crawl?
To allow, either omit rules for them (the default is allow) or write an explicit allow rule. The key is not adding a broad disallow that catches them. What is robots.txt explains the format and defaults.
How Do You Block Specific AI Bots?
To block a specific bot, add its user-agent and a disallow. For example, disallowing GPTBot stops OpenAI's crawler while leaving others untouched. This lets you take a middle path — block the training-focused crawlers you do not want, while allowing search-oriented ones that drive citations.
What Is the Smartest Configuration for Most Brands?
The stakes are concrete. DemandSage's ChatGPT statistics show AI is a mainstream research surface, and Conductor's GEO benchmarks confirm brands are evaluated by AI crawlers before users visit — which makes the robots.txt decision a visibility decision.
The common recommendation is to allow search-oriented AI bots — GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot — so your content can earn citations, and consider blocking only pure-training crawlers. This captures AI visibility while limiting use of your content for training. Perplexity bot robots.txt setup shows the per-engine config.
How Conbersa Configures AI Crawler Access
Conbersa helps the brands it works with configure crawler access deliberately — allowing the AI bots that drive citations while applying the site owner's preferences on training crawlers. Our platform manages distribution and configuration so content stays accessible to the engines that matter, and our content structure ensures what gets crawled is also extractable.
We built Conbersa because robots.txt is the gatekeeper between your content and AI visibility. If you are accidentally blocking AI bots — or leaving them blocked by default — you are opting out of AI citations without meaning to.