Geeks Digital 
To check if your website blocks AI crawlers, do three things: read your robots.txt for their user agents, test a page fetch pretending to be each bot, and search your server logs for their visits. Fifteen minutes tells you whether you are invisible to AI answers by accident.
Check 1: read your robots.txt honestly
Load yourdomain.com/robots.txt and search for these user agents: GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Bytespider. A line pairing any of them with Disallow: / blocks them completely. Also check for a blanket User-agent: * Disallow: / that catches everything. Note the nuance: Google-Extended controls AI training use, not Google Search itself.
Check 2: test a fetch as the bot
robots.txt is a request; firewalls are the enforcement, and they often block silently. From any terminal, run a curl request with the bot’s user agent string against one of your key pages, for example: curl -A “GPTBot” -I https://yourdomain.com/your-page/. A 200 response means readable; 403, 401 or an endless challenge page means your CDN or security plugin is turning AI crawlers away regardless of what robots.txt says. Cloudflare’s AI-bot toggles and aggressive WAF rules are the usual suspects.
Check 3: look for them in your logs
Server logs settle it: filter the last few weeks for the user agents above. Regular GPTBot and PerplexityBot visits mean access is working. Total absence on a site with any public profile usually means a block upstream, or that the bots have not discovered you, which llms.txt and sitemaps help fix.
What to do with the results
Decide deliberately, page by page: most businesses should open their marketing site, service pages and guides to retrieval bots, and may reasonably restrict bulk training crawlers or gated content. Write the policy into robots.txt, align the firewall with it, and add an llms.txt to guide the admitted bots to your best material.
My security plugin blocks all bots by default. Is that bad?
For AI visibility, yes: default paranoia makes you unquotable. Allowlist the specific AI user agents you want, keep protections for genuinely abusive traffic, and retest with the curl check.
If I unblock today, when do AI answers notice?
Retrieval-based surfaces like Perplexity can reflect access within days to weeks; training-memory effects follow model refreshes over months. Open the doors first; everything else builds on it.
We run this audit inside llms.txt & AI Crawl Control, with the rendering side covered by Technical SEO.
