GEO Robots.txt Checker

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making sure AI-powered search engines and chat assistants can find, understand and cite your content. If your robots.txt blocks the crawlers used by these engines, your site simply cannot appear in ChatGPT search, Claude answers, Perplexity citations, Google AI Overviews or Meta AI results — regardless of how good your content is.

The AI-search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) and user-fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) are the ones that actually surface your content in AI answers. AI-training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended) affect whether your content shapes the underlying models over time — a longer-term SEO decision.

That is a business decision. Blocking AI-training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, etc.) preserves the value of your content for licensing deals or reduces uncontrolled reuse. Allowing them can improve how confidently these models talk about your brand. Most publishers keep the AI-search bots allowed and only block training bots.

Google-Extended is a special user-agent that controls whether Google uses your content to train and improve its generative AI products (Gemini, previously Bard), without affecting Google Search ranking. Blocking Google-Extended does NOT remove you from Google Search — it only opts you out of AI training.

Content-Signal is an emerging directive proposed as an explicit, per-signal opt-in/opt-out for AI use (ai-train, search, ai-input). It complements robots.txt by expressing intent rather than crawler-specific rules. Support is still growing, but declaring it is a strong signal of your position on AI use.

Yes. Per the robots exclusion standard, when a site has no robots.txt (HTTP 404 or empty file), crawlers assume everything is allowed. Our checker reports this and marks every monitored bot as allowed.

If your robots.txt does not have a specific rule block for a bot (for example no explicit User-agent: GPTBot), the bot falls back to the User-agent: * group according to the robots exclusion protocol. The checker replicates the same behaviour so results reflect what real crawlers see.

The impact is usually minimal for typical sites. AI crawlers respect a crawl budget and pace themselves. If crawler load becomes an issue you can use Crawl-delay or restrict specific paths (e.g. /search/, /cart/) rather than blocking the bot entirely.

Yes. Every time you submit a URL we fetch robots.txt directly from the site with no caching, parse it and evaluate each bot against the current version. There is no data storage — results reflect the exact state of your robots.txt at the moment of the check.

Yes, completely free. No account, no signup and no usage limits. Ideal for ongoing GEO audits, competitor benchmarking and pre/post-deploy verification.