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How to Keep AI Crawlers Off Your Website

Use crawler-specific robots.txt directives to express your site’s policy, and CDN, WAF, or hosting controls when you need to block requests. Check search and retrieval effects before disallowing a crawler.
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To keep AI crawlers away, publish crawler-specific rules in your site’s root robots.txt, then use a CDN, web application firewall (WAF), or hosting control if you need requests blocked at the network layer. First decide whether you want to restrict training collection, search indexing, live retrieval, or all of them: different crawlers from one provider can serve different purposes, and blocking a search crawler can reduce your visibility in AI-powered search.

Choose what you want to restrict

“AI crawling” is not one activity. A provider may use separate crawlers for training data collection, search, or other retrieval features. Identify the purpose you want to limit before adding a rule, and check the provider’s current crawler documentation for the corresponding user-agent name.

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For example, OpenAI distinguishes GPTBot from OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says opting out of OAI-SearchBot means a site will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, although it may still appear as a navigational link. See OpenAI’s overview of its crawlers before deciding whether to disallow either one.

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Do not assume that blocking one crawler blocks every service from its provider. Likewise, a rule aimed at training does not necessarily prevent search or live retrieval. Review the identities and effects documented by each provider relevant to your site.

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Set crawler-specific rules in robots.txt

A robots.txt file belongs at the website’s root, such as https://example.com/robots.txt. It communicates crawl preferences to crawlers that consult it; it is not a password or a network firewall.

This illustrative pattern asks two named crawlers not to access any path:

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User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

Use only the user-agent names and paths that match your decision. The example does not block every AI crawler, and the relevant names or instructions can change. Consult the providers’ current guidance; Anthropic’s help article explains its crawler controls and identifies the top-level robots.txt approach: Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?

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Know what each control can and cannot do

Approach What it does Main tradeoff
robots.txt directives Signals disallowed paths to named crawlers that consult the file. Simple and crawler-specific, but it does not itself block network requests.
CDN, WAF, or hosting rule Can allow or block matching requests at the infrastructure layer. Can enforce access; configure matching carefully, including how crawler traffic is identified.
Managed crawler policy Can generate or synchronize policies across supported crawler identities. Centralized and convenient, but check which identities are covered and what rules are actually served.

If a crawler must be denied access rather than asked to stay away, use a control provided by your CDN, WAF, or host where available. Cloudflare documents controls to allow or block individual AI crawlers and behavior-based categories. Its documentation says all Cloudflare customers can choose to block AI bots and agents based on their behavior. See Cloudflare’s AI-bot documentation, Block AI Bots, and Bot Preference for the current capabilities and settings.

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Cloudflare groups bots into Search, Agent, and Training categories and describes defaults that were scheduled to change for new domains on September 15, 2026. The planned defaults distinguished pages displaying ads and included special handling for mixed-purpose crawlers. Because those defaults are time-sensitive and depend on configuration, check your account’s effective settings rather than relying on a summary of what was scheduled. Cloudflare also documents a managed robots.txt feature at AI Crawl Control; verify the actual file delivered at your edge.

Deploy and verify the policy

  1. List the outcome you want. Decide whether to limit training collection, search discovery, other retrieval, or more than one. Check the relevant providers’ current crawler identities and guidance.
  2. Edit the root robots.txt. Add a separate User-agent group for each crawler and the Disallow paths you intend. Avoid a blanket rule unless you are comfortable with its broader discovery effects.
  3. Add an enforcement rule if needed. In your CDN, WAF, or host controls, choose the relevant crawler or behavior category and set the desired action. Check whether a managed policy or edge feature can change the robots.txt response.
  4. Check what the public receives. Fetch the deployed /robots.txt through your normal public domain, not just from the origin or an editor preview. If a managed edge feature is enabled, compare the served file with the intended rules and inspect the effective edge configuration.
  5. Review request evidence. Use access logs or security events to check for matching user agents and whether requests are allowed or blocked. Logs help verify observed behavior, but a user-agent string alone should not be treated as proof of a crawler’s identity.
  6. Recheck after changes. Review provider guidance and your CDN or host settings when crawler names, service purposes, or platform defaults change.
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Why IP blocking alone is unreliable

Blocking a list of IP addresses can appear more direct, but it may not provide a persistent opt-out. Anthropic warns that IP blocking may not reliably persistently guarantee an opt-out because it can impede the crawler’s ability to read the site’s robots.txt. Prefer documented crawler controls and verify the behavior of the controls you use.

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