What this tool reads in your robots.txt
This tool fetches your site's robots.txt file and reads it specifically through the lens of AI bots. Where a normal robots.txt tester focuses on search engine crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot, this checker scans for the named user agents that belong to AI companies — the crawlers that gather content for AI training, for live answer generation, and for retrieval — and reports, bot by bot, what your file currently allows or disallows for each one. The output is a clear verdict on which AI crawlers your robots.txt admits and which it turns away, including the ones you may not have realized you were addressing or ignoring.
The distinction from the accessibility checker is important. This is purely a permission audit of one file. It does not fetch your pages, does not test whether content renders, and does not check for server-level blocks or paywalls. It reads the rules you have written and tells you what those rules say to AI agents. A bot can be allowed here and still fail to reach your content for other reasons; this tool's job is narrower and sharper — it tells you exactly what permission your robots.txt grants to each AI crawler, so you know whether the directives match what you actually intend.
The AI user agents it looks for
There is a growing roster of named AI crawlers, and they do not all do the same thing, which is why per-bot directives matter. Some user agents exist to collect data for training models. Others exist to fetch pages in real time when an AI assistant needs to answer a question with current information. Google operates a separate token that specifically governs whether your content can be used for its generative AI features, distinct from the Googlebot token that governs normal search indexing — meaning you can allow Google to rank you while controlling whether it uses your content in AI answers. Other major AI providers each publish their own crawler names with their own purposes.
This checker knows the common AI user agent names and looks for rules that target each of them, whether by an exact match or by a broader rule that would catch them. That matters because the effect on a given bot depends on how your file is written. A rule aimed at all agents applies to AI crawlers too unless a more specific rule overrides it. A rule naming one AI bot says nothing about the others. By laying out each known AI agent and the rule that governs it, the tool turns a wall of robots.txt text into a readable per-bot permission table, so you can see at a glance that, say, one AI crawler is blocked while three others are wide open.
How robots.txt precedence decides the outcome
The reason you need a tool rather than just eyeballing the file is that robots.txt matching has rules that are easy to get wrong. Crawlers obey the most specific group that names them, not necessarily the first one they see. A block in the catch-all group for all agents does not apply to an AI bot if that bot has its own named group, even an empty-looking one — the named group wins and the catch-all is ignored for that agent. This trips people up constantly: they add a sweeping block expecting it to cover everything, not realizing a named group elsewhere quietly exempts a specific AI crawler.
Within the matching group, the allow and disallow lines are evaluated by path specificity, so a more specific allow can carve an exception out of a broader disallow, and the order you wrote them in does not change that. This checker resolves that precedence the way a real crawler would and reports the net result for each AI agent, rather than just showing you the raw lines. That is the difference between knowing what your file contains and knowing what your file does — and for AI bots, where a single named group can flip an agent from blocked to allowed, the net result is the only thing that matters.
How to read the results
The clearest way to read the output is as a per-bot allow-or-block list. For each AI crawler the tool recognizes, it tells you whether your robots.txt currently lets that bot crawl, and which rule produced that outcome. If you intended to be fully open to AI, you want to see every relevant agent marked as allowed. If you intended to block AI entirely, you want every one marked as blocked, with no gaps. The most useful results are the surprises — the bot you thought you had blocked but had not, or the one you meant to allow but a broad disallow is catching.
Pay attention when the tool flags inconsistency, because mixed signals are usually accidental. Blocking one AI crawler while leaving its competitors open is sometimes deliberate, but more often it means you copied a snippet that named one bot and never extended it to the rest. Likewise, a Google generative-AI token set differently from your general crawl permission is a real and intentional control for some sites and an oversight for others. The tool cannot know your intent, so it presents the facts plainly and lets you judge whether the pattern you see is the pattern you wanted.
The common mistakes in AI bot directives
The most common mistake is assuming a catch-all rule covers AI bots when a more specific named group overrides it, leaving a crawler you meant to block fully allowed. The mirror-image mistake is naming a single AI agent in a block and believing you have blocked AI in general, when every other AI crawler sails past untouched because nothing names them. Both come from misunderstanding how robots.txt precedence works, and both leave a gap between intent and reality that this checker is built to expose.
Other recurring errors are typos in the user agent name, which silently make a rule match nothing; relying on robots.txt to enforce a hard ban when robots.txt is only a request that well-behaved bots honor and bad actors ignore; and forgetting that conflating search indexing with AI usage can backfire — for example, blocking the wrong Google token and accidentally harming your normal search visibility while trying to control AI use. There is also the simple omission of having no AI directives at all, which is itself a decision: it means every well-behaved AI crawler is allowed by default. This tool makes that default, and any deviation from it, explicit.
Why these directives matter in 2026
Controlling AI crawler access through robots.txt became a mainstream concern as AI answer engines and assistants turned into a real channel for discovery and, for some publishers, a real threat to their traffic. The decision of whether to allow each AI bot is genuinely strategic. Allowing them maximizes the chance your content is used in AI answers and surfaced to users who increasingly start in a chat interface. Blocking them protects content you do not want absorbed into models or used without a link back. Many sites land somewhere in between, allowing retrieval bots that cite sources while blocking pure training crawlers.
Whatever you decide, the directives only help if they actually express that decision, and that is the whole reason for this checker. Because the AI crawler landscape keeps shifting — new bots appear, providers rename or split their agents, and the line between training and retrieval moves — a robots.txt that was correct a year ago can be incomplete now. Reading your file specifically against the current set of AI agents, rather than the search crawlers most testers focus on, is the way to keep your stated policy and your actual policy in sync.
Where robots.txt rules end and other controls begin
It is worth being clear about the limits of the file this tool reads, because robots.txt is only one of several levers and it is the weakest one in terms of enforcement. A disallow line is a polite request, and well-behaved AI companies honor it, but it is not a lock. If you need a hard guarantee that a specific bot never reaches a page, robots.txt alone cannot give you that, and reading this checker as if it could would be a mistake. The file is the right place to state your general policy and the place most reputable crawlers consult first, which is exactly why getting it correct matters, but it is a signal, not a wall.
For finer or firmer control you reach for tools this checker does not cover. A page-level robots meta tag and the matching response header can tell a crawler not to index or not to use a page even when robots.txt allows the fetch, and some AI providers honor their own opt-out tokens at that level. Server-side rules, authentication, and rate limiting can refuse a request outright rather than ask it to behave. Each of these sits at a different layer, and the right answer is usually a combination, with robots.txt carrying your stated intent and stronger controls backing it where the stakes justify the effort. Knowing what your robots.txt says is the starting point for choosing which of those further controls you actually need.
What to do after you run it
Start by deciding your intent for each AI crawler, then compare it against the tool's per-bot verdict. Where they disagree, edit your robots.txt: add named groups for the AI agents you want to govern specifically, and make sure each one says exactly what you mean, since a named group overrides the catch-all for that bot. If you want a blanket policy, confirm there is no stray named group quietly exempting an agent from it. If you are using Google's generative-AI token, double-check you are setting the right token so you control AI use without disturbing normal search.
After editing, re-run the checker to confirm every AI agent now resolves to the permission you intended, and re-test whenever you hear about a new AI crawler so you can add a rule for it deliberately rather than defaulting to allow. Finally, remember that this tool covers permission only — if you are allowing AI crawlers, pair it with an accessibility check to confirm your content is actually reachable and readable once those bots are admitted. Permission without delivery, or delivery without permission, both leave you short of the goal.