AI SEO & Crawlers📅 2026-08-16• ⏱️ 2 min read• ✍️ SubmitLLMs Team
How to Configure robots.txt for AI Crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot & Perplexity
A comprehensive walkthrough on how to grant or restrict access to major AI user agents including GPTBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended.
Why AI Crawlers Are Different from Traditional Search Bots
Search engine crawlers (like Googlebot and Bingbot) crawl pages to index links for search result pages (SERPs). AI crawlers, however, operate in two distinct modes:
•Live Search / RAG Crawlers: Fetch real-time webpage content to answer live user prompts (e.g. ChatGPT Search, Perplexity Pro, Claude Artifacts).
•Model Training Crawlers: Scrape bulk data across the web to train future foundation models.
Major AI User-Agents to Know in 2026
| User-Agent | Operator | Primary Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| `GPTBot` | OpenAI | Training data collection for OpenAI foundation models |
| `ChatGPT-User` | OpenAI | Real-time browsing when ChatGPT users make queries |
| `ClaudeBot` / `Claude-Web` | Anthropic | Training & live real-time browsing for Claude models |
| `PerplexityBot` | Perplexity AI | Live search indexing and citations for Perplexity answers |
| `Google-Extended` | Controls Gemini and Vertex AI training access | |
| `Amazonbot` | Amazon | Alexa and Amazon AI indexing |
| `Bytespider` | ByteDance | TikTok / ByteDance LLM scraping |
| `cohere-ai` | Cohere | Enterprise RAG and training crawl |
Recommended robots.txt Configuration
To maximize your website's discovery by AI search assistants while directing them to your fast llms.txt file:
# Allow AI assistants to answer user queries with your content
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /
# Reference your LLM index and sitemap
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
# llms.txt reference
Allow: /llms.txt
Allow: /llms-full.txt
Allow: /.well-known/agent.jsonHow to Audit Your Robots.txt
Use the SubmitLLMs Robots.txt Auditor to instantly test which AI bots are currently permitted or blocked on your domain.
Want to check your own website's AI readiness?
Scan your domain in seconds to verify compliance with llms.txt, robots.txt, and agent.json protocols.