rankia.com: AI crawler policy in robots.txt

Q: Does rankia.com block GPTBot?

No. robots.txt as fetched on 2026-10-10: rankia.com disallows 1 of 22 AI and search crawlers from the site root: Applebot-Extended. It leaves the search and citation crawlers and the user-action fetchers open.

robots.txt as fetched on 2026-10-10: rankia.com disallows 1 of 22 AI and search crawlers from the site root: Applebot-Extended. It leaves the search and citation crawlers and the user-action fetchers open.

A protective stance that stays visible to AI answers: the file refuses training crawlers and leaves open the crawlers that let answer engines cite and link the site.

This reports what the file asks. It does not show whether a crawler can actually reach the site: many sites also block crawlers at their CDN or firewall, and some crawlers ignore robots.txt.

Training crawlers

Disallowing these keeps a site's content out of future model training. It does not remove what was already collected.

Crawler	Operator	Status	How the file treats it
GPTBot	OpenAI	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
ClaudeBot	Anthropic	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Google-Extended	Google	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
CCBot	Common Crawl	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
meta-externalagent	Meta	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Bytespider	ByteDance	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Applebot-Extended	Apple	disallowed	named in the file
Amazonbot	Amazon	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
cohere-ai	Cohere	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Diffbot	Diffbot	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
omgili	Webz.io	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Timpibot	Timpi	not disallowed	covered by the default rule

Search and citation crawlers

These feed AI answer engines that cite and link their sources. Disallowing them can take a site out of AI answers and out of the referral traffic that comes with them.

Crawler	Operator	Status	How the file treats it
OAI-SearchBot	OpenAI	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
PerplexityBot	Perplexity	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Claude-SearchBot	Anthropic	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
DuckAssistBot	DuckDuckGo	not disallowed	covered by the default rule

User-action fetchers

These fetch a page live when a person asks an assistant about it. Disallowing them stops the assistant reading the page for that person.

Crawler	Operator	Status	How the file treats it
ChatGPT-User	OpenAI	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Perplexity-User	Perplexity	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Claude-User	Anthropic	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
meta-externalfetcher	Meta	not disallowed	covered by the default rule

Classic search crawlers

Classic search crawlers, shown as the baseline.

Crawler	Operator	Status	How the file treats it
Googlebot	Google	not disallowed	covered by the default rule
Bingbot	Microsoft	not disallowed	covered by the default rule

How rankia.com compares

Among 65,831 readable sites in the Top 100,000, 12.9% disallow GPTBot, 10.8% ClaudeBot, 6.0% OAI-SearchBot and 7.9% PerplexityBot. Among 32,014 readable .com sites: 12.5% disallow GPTBot, 10.6% ClaudeBot.

History

First read 2026-10-10; the file has not changed since. Read the file itself.

The AI-related lines in the file

# ClaudeBot ya NO lleva grupo propio (decisión de dirección 11-sep, Trello:
# igual que Claude-User/Claude-SearchBot, cayendo en el bloque genérico de
# Applebot-Extended solo existe como token de robots.txt (no hace peticiones):
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
# GPTBot (OpenAI) y Google-Extended (opt-out de Gemini/Vertex, sin crawler
# propio) generan tráfico marginal frente a ClaudeBot: decisión de dirección
# 8-sep de abrirlos ya, sin esperar a las 72h de ClaudeBot. Trello: eWMiv6rw
# Los bots de IA que SÍ nos citan y enlazan (Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot,
# ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) NO llevan grupo propio a
# www.rankia.com (bingbot ~77.000, ClaudeBot ~

Check it live. This page shows the file as read on 2026-10-10. Run a live check of rankia.com and get told when it changes, or get the dataset for a segment.