Understanding AI Crawlers & robots.txt
AI companies deploy web crawlers to index content for their AI models. OpenAI uses GPTBot for ChatGPT, Anthropic uses ClaudeBot for Claude, and Google uses Google-Extended for Gemini. Your robots.txt file is the primary way to control which of these crawlers can access your content.
There's a trade-off: blocking AI crawlers protects your content from being used in AI training, but it also prevents your brand from appearing in AI-generated responses. For most businesses, allowing AI crawlers is beneficial because it increases visibility in the rapidly growing AI search ecosystem.
Important: blocking Google-Extended does NOT affect your Google Search rankings. Google Search uses Googlebot (which you should never block). Google-Extended only controls whether your content is used for Gemini AI training.