Free, instant, no signup

Free AI Crawler Checker

Check whether Googlebot, OAI SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and other major crawlers can access your website. ToolsNest reads your live robots.txt file and homepage directives to show which crawlers are allowed, blocked, or restricted, and why.

Enter a website above to see which crawlers can access it.

What Is an AI Crawler Checker

An AI crawler checker inspects the public files and directives your website already exposes, mainly robots.txt, along with meta robots tags and response headers, and reports what they allow for a specific crawler. It does not guess. It reads the same signals a real crawler reads before deciding whether to fetch your pages.

Websites control crawler access through robots.txt, a plain text file at the root of a domain that lists rules per user agent. A crawler that respects the standard checks this file before requesting pages, and follows any Allow or Disallow rules that apply to its own name or to the general wildcard group.

How the AI Crawler Checker Works

1
You enter a website URL or domain and submit the form.
2
The tool safely fetches robots.txt from your domain root, following redirects and validating the destination at each step.
3
It evaluates the rules for each supported crawler using proper user agent group matching, including specific groups, the wildcard group, and Allow versus Disallow precedence.
4
It fetches your homepage and checks the meta robots tag, the X Robots Tag response header, and the canonical URL.
5
It checks for a sitemap declared in robots.txt and for a sitemap.xml file at the common location.
6
It returns a separate, specific result for every crawler, along with a Crawler Accessibility Score and any recommendations based on what was actually found.

Which AI Crawlers Does This Tool Check

The tool checks robots.txt rules for the following crawlers, grouped by their general role. Descriptions are kept to what each organization has publicly documented about that crawler's identity.

Search engines

Googlebot

Google

Crawls pages for Google Search indexing and ranking.

Bingbot

Microsoft

Crawls pages for Bing Search indexing. Bing results also feed Microsoft Copilot.

Applebot

Apple

Crawls pages for Siri, Spotlight, and Safari search features.

Amazonbot

Amazon

Crawls pages to improve Amazon's services, including Alexa's ability to answer questions.

AI search and answer engines

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI

Crawls pages so they can be surfaced as links and sources in ChatGPT search.

ChatGPT-User

OpenAI

Fetches a specific page on demand when a ChatGPT user references that link in a conversation.

Claude-SearchBot

Anthropic

Crawls pages to support Claude's web search and citation features.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity AI

Crawls and indexes pages to power Perplexity's answer engine and citations.

Perplexity-User

Perplexity AI

Fetches a specific page on demand when a Perplexity user's query references that link.

YouBot

You.com

Crawls and indexes pages to power You.com's AI powered search answers.

AI model related crawlers

GPTBot

OpenAI

Crawls content that OpenAI may use to train and improve its AI models.

ClaudeBot

Anthropic

Crawls content that Anthropic may use to train and improve its Claude models.

CCBot

Common Crawl

Crawls the web to build the open Common Crawl dataset, which many organizations, including AI labs, use for training data.

Applebot-Extended

Apple

Controls whether Apple may use crawled content to train Apple Intelligence and other Apple AI models, separate from Applebot's search indexing.

Google-Extended

Google

Controls whether Google may use crawled content to train Gemini and other Google AI models, separate from Googlebot's search indexing.

Bytespider

ByteDance

ByteDance's web crawler, associated with data collection that can include AI training.

Other web crawlers

AI Crawlers and robots.txt

robots.txt is organized into groups. Each group starts with one or more User-agent lines and is followed by the rules that apply to those crawlers. A crawler checks for a group written for its own name first. If none exists, it falls back to the group written for the wildcard user agent.

For example, this configuration allows general crawling but blocks one specific AI crawler from training related crawling while leaving everything else open:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

In this example, Googlebot, Bingbot, and most other crawlers fall under the wildcard group and are allowed. GPTBot has its own group with a full Disallow, so it is blocked, even though the wildcard group allows everything.

Should You Block or Allow AI Crawlers

There is no universal answer, and this tool does not try to give you one. Some website owners want broad discovery and are comfortable with search related and AI related crawlers accessing their public content. Others prefer tighter control, particularly around crawlers associated with model training, and choose to block those specifically while keeping search crawlers open.

Different crawlers can also serve different purposes even within the same organization. A search related crawler used to surface links in an AI product is not the same as a crawler used to collect training data, and a site may reasonably choose to treat them differently.

This tool's role is to show you what your current configuration actually allows, clearly and per crawler, so the decision stays with you.

Difference Between Search Crawlers and AI Related Crawlers

Search crawlers, such as Googlebot and Bingbot, fetch pages to build a search index used for traditional search results. AI related crawlers cover a broader mix of purposes: some fetch pages on demand to answer a specific user question, some crawl and index content for an AI powered answer engine, and some collect content that may be used to train a model.

These roles are not interchangeable, and a single robots.txt file can treat them differently. This tool avoids collapsing every AI related crawler into one label, and reports each one separately for that reason.

What If My robots.txt File Is Missing

A missing robots.txt file, one that returns a 404 response, generally means there are no crawling restrictions in place. Crawlers are free to access the site by default. This does not mean every page is guaranteed to appear in search results or in an AI answer. Other controls, such as a meta robots tag or an X Robots Tag response header on individual pages, can still restrict indexing even with no robots.txt file present.

What Is llms.txt

llms.txt is an emerging convention some websites use to publish a short, structured summary of their content intended for AI systems to read. It is not an official web standard, it is not supported by every crawler, and it does not control crawler access in the way robots.txt does.

This tool checks whether an llms.txt file exists purely as an informational data point. Its presence or absence carries no meaningful weight in the Crawler Accessibility Score, and creating one is not shown here as something that improves AI rankings or visibility, because that has not been established.

Common AI Crawler Access Problems

Patterns this tool is built to catch and explain clearly.

Blocking all crawlers by accident

A Disallow: / rule under User-agent: * blocks every crawler that does not have a more specific rule of its own. This is a common leftover from a staging environment.

Using Disallow: / under a broad user agent group

A rule meant for one crawler is sometimes placed under a wildcard group by mistake, which then applies to every crawler instead of the one it was intended for.

Conflicting crawler rules

A crawler can appear in more than one group, or be covered by both a specific group and the wildcard group. When this happens, its own named group takes priority over the wildcard group.

Blocking important public content

Disallow rules on paths that hold key pages, such as product or article pages, prevent crawlers from reaching content that is otherwise meant to be public.

Using noindex on important pages

A noindex meta tag or X Robots Tag header can keep a page out of search results even when robots.txt allows it to be crawled.

Missing or broken robots.txt

A robots.txt file that returns a server error instead of a normal response or a 404 can cause some crawlers to slow down or pause crawling until it resolves.

Redirecting robots.txt incorrectly

robots.txt should be reachable directly at the domain root. Redirecting it to another domain or a login page can prevent crawlers from reading it at all.

Blocking the homepage

A Disallow rule that matches the homepage path removes the main entry point crawlers use to discover the rest of the site.

How to Check Whether an AI Bot Can Crawl Your Website

1. Open this page and enter your website URL or domain.

2. Run the check and find the crawler you care about in the results, grouped by category.

3. Read its status and, if one exists, the specific rule that produced it.

4. If the result is not what you intended, copy the suggested robots.txt snippet and add it to your own robots.txt file at your domain root.

5. Re run the check after publishing the change to confirm it took effect.

Why Crawler Access Matters

If a crawler cannot access your pages, it cannot read them, and content it cannot read cannot be considered by whatever system that crawler feeds. That is a discoverability question, not a guarantee. Allowing a crawler does not promise a ranking, a citation, or inclusion in any AI generated answer, and blocking one does not automatically remove you from consideration elsewhere. Confirming your configuration actually matches your intent is the useful, verifiable part, and that is what this tool checks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about AI crawlers, robots.txt, and this tool.

What is an AI crawler checker?

An AI crawler checker reads a website's robots.txt file and homepage directives, then reports whether specific crawlers, including search engines and AI related bots, are allowed to access the site. This tool checks the same public files a crawler itself would read.

How do I check if GPTBot can access my website?

Enter your website URL above and run the check. The results list GPTBot separately from every other crawler, along with the exact robots.txt rule that applies to it, if one exists.

How do I check OAI SearchBot access?

OAI SearchBot is listed in the results as a distinct crawler from GPTBot. OpenAI uses GPTBot mainly for training related crawling and OAI SearchBot for search related crawling, so a site can allow one while blocking the other.

Can robots.txt block AI crawlers?

Yes. Reputable AI crawlers identify themselves with a specific user agent name and are expected to follow robots.txt rules written for that name or for a wildcard group that covers all crawlers.

Does blocking GPTBot affect Google rankings?

No. GPTBot is unrelated to Google Search indexing. Blocking it affects whether OpenAI may crawl your content for model training, not whether Googlebot can crawl or index your pages.

What happens if my website has no robots.txt file?

A missing robots.txt file generally means there are no crawling restrictions in place, and crawlers are free to access the site by default. Other controls, such as a meta robots tag or an X Robots Tag header, can still restrict indexing even without a robots.txt file.

Should I allow all AI crawlers?

There is no single correct answer. Some website owners want their content discoverable by as many AI systems as possible, others prefer to restrict crawlers used for model training while still allowing search related crawlers. This tool reports your current configuration so you can decide.

Does llms.txt control AI crawler access?

No. llms.txt is an emerging, informational convention some sites use to summarize their content for AI systems. It does not control crawler access. Crawler access is controlled by robots.txt and by HTTP level directives such as meta robots and X Robots Tag.

Can this tool change my robots.txt file?

No. This tool only reads your public robots.txt file and other public signals. It never modifies your website. Where relevant, it shows an example robots.txt snippet you can copy and apply yourself.

Is the AI Crawler Checker free?

Yes. The tool is free to use, with no signup, no paid API dependency, and no usage limit tied to an account.

Related Tools

Robots.txt Generator

Build and download a valid robots.txt file with user agent rules and sitemap declarations.

SEO Audit Tool

Run a full technical SEO audit on any URL, crawlability, speed, meta tags, and more.

Meta Tag Generator

Generate title, description, and Open Graph tags for any page.

Sitemap Generator

Build a valid XML sitemap and download it ready for your robots.txt Sitemap line.

Also available over MCP

This check is also exposed as an MCP tool, toolsnest_check_ai_crawlers, for AI agents connected to the ToolsNest MCP server. See the MCP Server page for connection details.