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AEO Canon · the reference for answer-engine optimization

Lesson 1 of 6

Allow AI Crawlers in robots.txt

AI engines can only cite pages their crawlers may fetch. This lesson deploys a verified, permissive robots.txt.

Learning objectives

  • Write an explicit allow block for AI crawlers.
  • Avoid the leftover Disallow that blocks everyone.
  • Verify robots.txt is live and correct.

The lesson

Read the full lesson →How to Allow AI Crawlers in robots.txtAI engines can only cite pages their crawlers are allowed to fetch. This guide gives you a verified, copy-paste robots.txt block that explicitly allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and Bingbot — plus the one mistake that silently blocks them all.3 min read

Key takeaways

  • The most specific user-agent group wins.
  • A stray site-wide Disallow silently blocks every crawler.
  • robots.txt must return 200 as text/plain at the root.

Knowledge check

Knowledge check

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  1. 1. Which robots.txt group does a crawler obey?

  2. 2. What is the most common blocking mistake?