What this generator builds and why robots.txt is the lever
This tool builds the exact lines you paste into your robots.txt file to allow or block the crawlers that AI companies run. Robots.txt is a plain text file that lives at the root of your domain, and it is the oldest and most widely respected mechanism for telling automated visitors what they may and may not fetch. Every well-behaved AI crawler reads it before touching your pages. By generating clean, correctly formatted user-agent and disallow lines for the specific AI bots you care about, this generator lets you decide, in one place, whether your content is available to be used for training large language models, for grounding live answers, or for both, without you having to memorize each bot's name or worry about a typo silently breaking the whole file.
The reason a dedicated generator exists, rather than you just editing robots.txt by hand, is that the AI crawler landscape is messy and easy to get wrong. The bots have unintuitive names, several companies run more than one crawler for different purposes, the names change, and a single malformed line can cause a crawler to ignore your intent entirely or, worse, cause a search engine to misread the file. This tool encodes the current set of known AI user-agents and emits a block that is syntactically correct, so the rules you intend are the rules that actually take effect.
The AI bots the generator knows about
The generator covers the major AI crawlers by their real user-agent names. GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler that gathers content used to train its models. OAI-SearchBot and the ChatGPT user agent are the separate crawlers OpenAI uses to fetch pages for live browsing and search answers rather than training, which is an important distinction because you might be happy to be cited in a live answer while declining to be used as training material. ClaudeBot and the related Anthropic user agents fetch content for Anthropic's models and assistant. Google-Extended is the token Google provides that controls whether your content may be used for Gemini and Vertex AI training, separate from Googlebot, which still handles normal search indexing.
The generator also covers PerplexityBot, which Perplexity uses to fetch and cite pages in its answer engine, along with Applebot-Extended for Apple Intelligence training, Bytespider from the company behind a major short-video platform, CCBot from the Common Crawl project whose archive feeds many downstream models, and several others that come and go. Each of these is a distinct user-agent string, and the whole point of the tool is that you choose which to allow and which to block per bot, then it writes the matching rules. You are never forced into an all-or-nothing choice; you can welcome the crawlers that send you cited traffic while declining the ones that only take.
Allow, block, or somewhere in between
The central decision the generator helps you make is not binary, even though it produces binary rules per bot. There are three coherent strategies, and the right one depends on your goals. The open strategy allows every AI crawler, betting that being present in training data and live answers builds long-term visibility and brand familiarity even if it does not always send a click. The closed strategy blocks the training crawlers to keep your content out of model weights, often chosen by publishers and businesses whose content is their product and who do not want it absorbed for free. The middle strategy, which many sites land on, blocks training crawlers while allowing the search and citation crawlers, so your pages can still be cited in live AI answers that link back to you, without your work becoming permanent training material.
Because the tool separates training crawlers from search and citation crawlers, it makes that middle strategy easy to express precisely. You can block GPTBot and Google-Extended while allowing OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and the generator writes those rules without you having to know which name maps to which purpose. That precision is the difference between a thoughtful policy and a blunt instrument that accidentally blocks the very crawlers that would have sent you traffic.
How to read and place the generated file
The output is a block of user-agent lines, each followed by an allow or disallow line, written in the standard robots.txt grammar. A user-agent line names the bot, and the disallow line that follows it with a single forward slash blocks that bot from your entire site, while an allow line or an empty disallow leaves it free to crawl. The generator groups these so each bot's rule is unambiguous. You take the generated block and place it in the robots.txt file at the very root of your domain, so that it is reachable at the standard robots location, because crawlers only look there and nowhere else.
If you already have a robots.txt with rules for search engines, you add the AI bot block alongside your existing rules rather than replacing them, keeping your Googlebot and Bingbot directives intact. The order of groups does not change their meaning because each user-agent group is matched independently, but keeping the AI rules together makes the file readable for the humans who maintain it. After you deploy, fetch the file in a browser to confirm it serves as plain text and that the rules read exactly as the generator produced them.
The mistakes that quietly break AI bot rules
The most damaging mistake is assuming a single generic rule covers AI crawlers. A wildcard user-agent rule that disallows everything will indeed block compliant AI bots, but it also blocks search engines, which is rarely what you want, and many people instead write a wildcard allow that does nothing to stop AI training. AI crawlers each have their own name, and only a rule that names them, or a deliberate wildcard, applies to them. Another frequent error is blocking the wrong member of a company's fleet, for example disallowing the search crawler you wanted to keep while leaving the training crawler open, which is the exact opposite of a common goal.
People also forget that robots.txt is a request, not a wall. Reputable AI companies honor it, but it does not technically prevent a bad actor from fetching your pages, so it is the right tool for stating policy to compliant crawlers but not a security control for stopping determined scraping. Other mistakes include placing the file anywhere other than the domain root, serving it with the wrong content type, leaving a stray rule that contradicts your AI rules, and forgetting that subdomains need their own robots.txt. The generator removes the formatting errors, but you still have to deploy it to the right place and keep it consistent with your other rules.
How AI bot control fits SEO and AI search in 2026
By 2026 controlling AI crawlers is a standard part of a site's technical setup, sitting right next to the search engine directives every site already maintains. The strategic question has matured from whether to block AI to which crawlers serve your interests. Blocking the search and citation crawlers, the ones that fetch a page to answer a live question and link back to the source, can cut you out of the AI answer surfaces where a growing share of discovery now happens, which is usually a mistake for anyone who wants visibility. Blocking the training crawlers is a more defensible choice for content owners who do not want their work baked into models they cannot control, and it carries little direct traffic cost because training crawls do not send referrals.
Getting this balance right is now part of doing SEO, not separate from it. The same way you would not leave your robots.txt blocking Googlebot by accident, you do not want to be silently absent from Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity answers because a crawler you needed was disallowed, nor do you want your premium content scraped for training if your business model depends on people coming to you to read it. A deliberate, well-formed AI bot policy expresses your stance clearly to every compliant crawler and is easy to revisit as the landscape shifts.
What to do after you generate the rules
Deploy the generated block to your root robots.txt, then verify it by loading the file directly and confirming every line reads as intended. If you run multiple subdomains, repeat the deployment for each one, since a rule on your main domain does not carry to a subdomain. Decide and document your strategy in plain terms, whether you are open to all AI crawlers, closed to training but open to citation, or fully closed, so that whoever edits the file next does not undo your intent by accident.
After deployment, watch your server logs over the following weeks to see which AI bots actually visit and whether they respect the rules you set, because the logs are the ground truth that confirms a compliant crawler honored your disallow or kept crawling under your allow. Revisit the file periodically, since new AI crawlers appear and existing ones occasionally rename their user-agent, and a policy that was complete six months ago may now have gaps. Re-run this generator whenever the bot list changes so your robots.txt keeps expressing exactly the AI access you mean to grant, and treat the file as a living statement of policy rather than something you set once and forget.