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Is your website blocking ChatGPT?

A lot of websites turn away the readers that ChatGPT, Google, Claude and Perplexity send to look at a page, usually without the owner ever deciding to. This free checker asks your homepage ten times — once as an ordinary browser and once as each AI reader — reads your robots.txt file, and tells you in plain words which ones got in and which ones were turned away.

Free, no signup, nothing saved unless you ask us to email it. Takes about fifteen seconds.

What is actually being blocked

When someone asks ChatGPT which alarm company to call, ChatGPT does not open your website the way you do. It sends a reader — a small program that fetches the page and hands back the words. That reader arrives with its own name, and your website, your host, or your security plugin decides whether to let it in.

Most owners have never made that decision. The switch got flipped by a host, a security plugin, or a support person clearing up a traffic problem, and nobody mentioned it. The only way to know is to knock on the door the way the reader does, which is what this page just did.

What a block costs you

Blocking AI is a fair instinct

A lot of owners turn these readers away on purpose, and the reason is a good one: they do not want a company they never agreed to work with lifting the pages they paid to write and selling the answer. That is a real objection and nobody should talk you out of it.

But it costs you the one thing you want

When a customer asks an assistant who to call, the assistant can only use what it is allowed to read. If your site turns it away, it does not skip your town — it answers anyway, using whatever it can reach. It may still name you from Yelp, a directory, or an old listing, but it cannot use a single word you wrote: not your response time, not the brands you carry, not your license, not the fact that you answer at two in the morning.

Your competitor's site is probably open

Most small business sites have never touched any of this, which means the assistant reads them and not you. The one that gets described in the answer is the one that let the reader in.

How to fix it

A block lives in one of three places. Work through them in this order — the first one is free and takes two minutes, and it is where most of them turn out to be.

1. Your robots.txt file

A plain text file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. It is a request, not a wall — the readers from ChatGPT, Claude and Google follow it because they choose to. If it names an AI reader with a Disallow line, that reader stays out.

  1. 1Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see a page not found, you do not have one, and this is not where your block is.
  2. 2Look for a line with an AI name on it: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot.
  3. 3If the line under it says Disallow: / then that reader has been asked to stay out. Delete those two lines, or change Disallow: / to Allow: /.
  4. 4On WordPress, robots.txt is usually generated by your SEO plugin. In Yoast, it is Yoast SEO, then Tools, then File editor. In Rank Math, it is General Settings, then Edit robots.txt.
  5. 5Save, then load yourdomain.com/robots.txt again to confirm the line is gone.

How you can tell: This is the polite kind of block. The reader could get in, and is choosing not to because you asked.

2. Your host or your CDN's bot setting

One switch in a control panel, usually turned on by a well-meaning support person or on by default. This one is a real wall — the reader is refused at the door and never reaches your site at all.

  1. 1Cloudflare: log in, pick your site, then Security, then Bots. Look for Block AI bots or AI Scrapers and Crawlers and turn it off. Also check Security, then AI Audit, which can be set to block. Then check Security, then WAF for any custom rule naming a bot.
  2. 2SiteGround: Site Tools, then Security, then Blocked IPs and Site Scanner. The bot protection that shows a visitor a challenge page lives under Speed, then Caching, and under Security, then Bot Protection. Ask support to allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User by name.
  3. 3GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, WP Engine, Kinsta: every one of them has a firewall or bot-protection page in the dashboard. Search their help for AI crawler and follow it, or open a ticket and give them the eight names above.
  4. 4Squarespace, Wix, Shopify: look for a setting called something like Block AI crawlers or Prevent AI training in your site settings, under SEO or under Privacy.

How you can tell: If an ordinary browser gets your homepage but the AI readers get a refusal or a challenge page, this is almost always where it lives.

3. A security plugin or a firewall rule

A rule inside WordPress, or on the server, that refuses a visitor by the name it arrives with. Same effect as the host switch, just closer to home.

  1. 1Wordfence: Wordfence, then Blocking, then look at Custom Pattern blocks for any User-Agent entry naming a bot. Also check Firewall, then Rate Limiting, where a strict setting will throw a challenge at anything that is not a person.
  2. 2All In One WP Security, iThemes / SolidWP Security, Sucuri: each has a blacklist or a bot-blocking page. Check each one for an AI name.
  3. 3Cleanup crews and agencies sometimes add these on request and never mention it. If your site was cleaned after a hack, ask whoever did it.
  4. 4On a server you control, check the .htaccess file and any nginx config for lines matching GPTBot or ClaudeBot by name.

How you can tell: Check this one last. It is the least common of the three and the hardest to find, so rule out robots.txt and the host first.

Questions owners ask

Should I block AI crawlers?
It depends on what you sell. If your website is your storefront and you want customers to find you, blocking them costs you more than it protects. If your website is the product — a paid course, a members area, original photography — blocking the training crawlers is reasonable. The middle path is to block the ones that collect pages for training and allow the ones that let an assistant name you in an answer.
Does blocking GPTBot remove me from ChatGPT?
No. GPTBot is the reader that collects pages to train OpenAI's models. The reader that lets ChatGPT find and name your business in an answer is called OAI-SearchBot, and ChatGPT-User is the one that goes out when a person asks about your page specifically. Blocking GPTBot leaves those two working. If you want to stay in the answers, do not block OAI-SearchBot or ChatGPT-User.
Will this checker tell me for certain that my site is blocking ChatGPT?
It tells you what it observed. It asks your homepage as an ordinary browser first, then as each AI reader, and compares. If your site shows our checker a challenge page too, we say we could not tell rather than guessing — and a challenge that strict usually stops AI readers as well, since they arrive the same way we did.
Does blocking Google-Extended hurt my Google rankings?
No. Google-Extended is a robots.txt setting that controls whether your pages are used to train Google's own AI, the one that writes those answers at the top of a search. Google states plainly that it does not affect whether you appear in Google Search and is not used as a ranking signal. Googlebot, the ordinary search reader, is a separate thing.
I never set any of this up. Why would my site be blocking anything?
Because somebody else turned it on. Cloudflare added a one-click Block AI bots switch and turns it on for some plans by default. Hosts added bot protection that challenges anything that does not look like a person. SEO plugins ship robots.txt templates. Most blocks we see were never a decision anybody made on purpose.

Sources

Every reader name and every claim about what each one does comes from the company that runs it. We read these before writing any of it down.

Getting let in is the first step. Getting named is the rest.

AI Security Edge helps security companies get named by ChatGPT and Google. Once the readers are allowed in, the question becomes whether what they find is worth repeating. See where your company stands today.

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