AI Bot Accessibility

What is AI Bot Accessibility?

AI Bot Accessibility describes whether the major AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and others — can read a site's content and consider it for citation. Domains that block these bots are excluded from training data and real-time citation candidates, which makes AI Bot Accessibility the single highest-priority signal in GEO and AEO measurement.

It is governed by two files: robots.txt (allow/disallow policy) and llms.txt (a content-guidance standard). Auditing both is the core of an AI bot accessibility check.

Eight major AI bots

Each bot can be controlled independently via User-agent: <bot-name> in robots.txt.

Common mistakes

• Blocking everything with User-agent: *. Unintentionally blocks all AI bots.
• Edge / firewall blocks. robots.txt allows the bot, but Cloudflare or AWS WAF blocks it at the edge.
• Assuming Google-Extended allow is enough. It is just the Gemini opt-out token, separate from Googlebot.
• Checking only Disallow: / and missing partial paths. Partial blocks like Disallow: /blog/ still hurt visibility.

What a GEO analysis tool checks

1. Whether robots.txt exists and returns 200 (vs 404)
2. Allow/disallow state for 8–12 major AI bots
3. Presence and shape of an llms.txt file
4. Real bot responses through CDN / firewall (live test call)
5. If blocked, whether it is intentional (matches site terms / privacy policy)

Related terms

• robots.txt
• llms.txt
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
• AI Visibility Diagnosis