Should I block AI crawlers like GPTBot on my website?

AI companies run several crawlers with different jobs, and robots.txt lets you treat each separately. OpenAI documents GPTBot for gathering material that may be used to train its models, OAI-SearchBot for finding pages to show in ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User for pages a user asks ChatGPT to open. Google uses the Google-Extended token to let sites opt out of their content being used for Gemini training; Google says that setting does not affect inclusion in Google Search. Perplexity identifies its crawler as PerplexityBot. Other providers publish their own names.

Blocking makes sense for some publishers: news organisations, writers and course creators whose content is the product and who object to it being used to train models without payment. For a clinic, shop, school or service business in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the content exists to bring in customers. Being readable by AI search tools is usually in your interest, and blocking their search crawlers removes a way to be recommended. Many owners block them without knowing it, through a security plugin, hosting firewall or a robots.txt template copied from elsewhere.

A balanced setup for most businesses is to allow search and user-triggered crawlers and decide on training crawlers according to your own view. Check your robots.txt at yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines naming these bots or a blanket rule blocking all unknown agents. Also check your firewall or CDN settings, which can block bots before robots.txt is even read. Keep in mind that robots.txt is a request: reputable crawlers follow it, but it is not a security tool. If something must stay private, put it behind a login.