# AI Crawlers Compatibility Checker

Analyze AI bot robots.txt permissions for a specific public URL. This is a static policy assessment, not a live verified crawler test.

Canonical URL: https://www.hota.digital/t/ai-crawlers-compatibility-checker

## Understand the results

robots.txt controls compliant crawling. X-Robots-Tag and HTML meta robots govern indexing for supporting crawlers, not universal AI bot access. Blocking in robots.txt can prevent crawlers from seeing noindex.

## FAQs

### How do I use the AI Crawlers Compatibility Checker?

Enter a publicly reachable page URL and click Check crawler access. The tool retrieves that site’s robots.txt and the page response, evaluates the exact URL path against each crawler token, then lists the matching robots.txt rule and any discovered indexing directives.

### What do Allowed, Blocked and Unknown mean?

Allowed means no matching robots.txt disallow rule was found for that crawler and path. Blocked means a disallow rule won the match. Unknown means robots.txt could not be reliably checked. None of these results proves a bot actually visited or could fetch the URL through a CDN or firewall.

### Does Allowed mean ChatGPT or Google will cite my website?

No. Robots permission is one prerequisite for automated crawling, not a visibility score or citation guarantee. Content quality, indexing, relevance, permissions, rendering and ranking also matter.

### What is robots.txt?

robots.txt is a text file at the origin root, such as https://example.com/robots.txt. It gives cooperating crawlers Allow and Disallow rules for URL paths. RFC 9309 standardizes matching behavior. It is not authentication or security enforcement.

### Where do I change robots.txt?

Edit the robots.txt file served from the site root, or use your CMS/hosting robots configuration. On WordPress, a real robots.txt file or an SEO plugin can control the response; on other stacks edit the web root or edge configuration. Then request /robots.txt directly and recheck your page.

### What is the difference between robots.txt, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag?

robots.txt governs whether compliant crawlers should request a URL. Meta robots tags in an HTML head and X-Robots-Tag response headers express indexing and snippet instructions to supporting search crawlers. X-Robots-Tag also works on PDFs and other non-HTML responses. Meta and header directives do not necessarily apply to every AI training or user-triggered bot.

### Why can noindex fail when robots.txt blocks the URL?

A crawler must fetch the page or its headers to observe a noindex instruction. If robots.txt disallows that URL, the crawler normally cannot discover the noindex directive. For removal from search, allow crawling long enough for the crawler to see noindex, or use the search engine’s removal mechanisms.

### What is the difference between OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot?

OpenAI describes OAI-SearchBot as serving ChatGPT search discovery and GPTBot as model-development crawling. Their robots.txt controls are independent, so a site can allow search discovery while disallowing model-training crawling. ChatGPT-User handles certain user-initiated requests, for which robots rules may not apply.

### Does Google-Extended identify a separate crawler?

No. Google-Extended is a robots.txt control token for specified Google AI uses, not a separate HTTP user-agent. Googlebot remains a distinct crawler used for Google Search; blocking Google-Extended does not block Google Search inclusion.

### Can robots.txt stop malicious bots or guarantee blocking?

No. robots.txt is an advisory public protocol. Use authentication, authorization, CDN/WAF rules, and verified IP information for actual access controls. User-Agent headers are easily spoofed.

### What if robots.txt is missing or returns an error?

A confirmed 404 normally means no robots.txt rules are published and thus no robots exclusion restrictions were detected. Timeouts, 403, 429, or server errors are marked Unknown because different crawlers may handle unreachable robots files differently.

### Can the checker detect JavaScript-rendered meta tags or CDN bot blocks?

No. This is a server-side static fetch. It does not execute JavaScript, impersonate each crawler from its network, or verify crawler IPs. Review actual logs, edge security rules, rendered DOM and provider tools to confirm production access.