Guide hub
AI crawler control guides
AI crawler policy is now part SEO, part content licensing, part documentation operations, and part site maintenance. These guides explain the practical decisions behind each tool.
Robots.txt for AI Crawlers
Understand how training bots, AI search crawlers, user-triggered fetchers, and normal search bots should be treated differently.
GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot
Compare OpenAI crawler roles and avoid blocking useful discovery when the intent is only to limit model training.
LLMs.txt Guide
Create a human-readable map for AI assistants and documentation agents.
AI Crawler User-Agent Directory
Review common crawler names and the operational questions to ask before allowing or blocking each one.
Robots.txt Examples
Use sample policies for publishers, SaaS docs, ecommerce stores, blogs, and mixed public/private sites.
How to Test AI Crawler Access
Check the live file, representative paths, CDN behavior, sitemap references, and change history before publishing.
Editorial standard for this guide set
Every guide is written to support a practical task. A useful page should explain what the visitor is deciding, what file or note they should produce, what assumptions they should record, and where a generated result stops being enough. That keeps the site closer to a working reference library than a thin directory of keywords.
The guides intentionally avoid claims that robots.txt is security. Robots.txt is a public preference file. Private content still needs authentication, access control, noindex behavior where appropriate, and a server-side policy that does not depend on polite crawler behavior.