How to Check if a Website Blocks AI Bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot)

With the rise of AI crawling, many websites now block AI bots in their robots.txt. Here's how to check. The Quick Way Fetch any site's robots.txt and look for these user-agents: User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: / User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / If you see Disallow: / for any of these — that bot is blocked. Examples NYTimes — blocks GPTBot, CCBot ✅ OpenAI.com — does NOT block AI bots (interesting!) ❌ Google.com — selective blocking Automated Check I built a Robots.txt Analyzer that automatically detects AI bot blocking: { "domain" : "nytimes.com" , "aiBotsBlocked" : true , "blockedBots" : { "GPTBot" : true , "ClaudeBot" : false , "CCBot" : true , "Googlebot" : false } } Why This Matters For AI companies : know which data sources you can legally train on For publishers : verify your robots.txt actually blocks unwanted crawlers For researchers : study the AI crawling landscape Free tool o