How to Allow AI and LLMs to Crawl Your Website

If you have noticed that AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are starting to answer questions that used to send people to your website, you are not imagining it. AI-powered search is changing how people find businesses online, and if your website is not set up to be crawled by these systems, you are leaving visibility on the table.

The good news is that you do not need to be a developer to take action. This guide walks you through exactly how to open your website up to AI crawlers and large language models (LLMs), why it matters for your SEO strategy, and what to check first before making any changes.

What Are AI Crawlers and Why Do They Matter?

Traditional search engines like Google use bots to crawl and index your website. AI systems work similarly, but instead of just indexing pages for a list of blue links, they are pulling content from websites to train models and generate answers directly inside chat interfaces and AI search results.

Tools like ChatGPT (via its GPTBot crawler), Perplexity (PerplexityBot), Google’s Bard and Gemini systems, Apple’s Applebot-Extended, and others all have their own crawlers that visit websites to gather information. If your site is blocking these crawlers, you are essentially invisible to AI-generated answers.

For local service businesses, this is increasingly important. When someone asks an AI assistant “who is the best web designer near me” or “how do I improve my small business website,” the AI is drawing on content it has already crawled. If your site is blocked or improperly configured, your competitors get cited instead of you.

Step 1: Check Your robots.txt File First

Before you make any changes, you need to know what your current settings actually are. Your robots.txt file is a plain text file that sits at the root of your website and tells crawlers what they are and are not allowed to access.

To find it, go to your browser and type your domain followed by /robots.txt. For example: yourdomain.com/robots.txt

You will see a file that looks something like this:

User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/

Here is what to look for:

• User-agent: * means the rule applies to all crawlers
• Disallow: / with a forward slash and nothing after it means ALL crawlers are blocked from your entire site
• Disallow: with nothing after it means crawlers are allowed everywhere (this is the open setting)

If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, your site is blocking every bot, including AI crawlers. This is a critical issue to fix.

Step 2: Identify Which AI Crawlers You Want to Allow

Different AI platforms use different crawler names. Before editing your robots.txt file, it helps to know which ones you are dealing with. Here are the most common ones as of 2025:

This list will continue to grow as more AI platforms enter the space. The safest approach for most small businesses is to simply allow all well-behaved crawlers and only block specific ones if you have a reason to.

Step 3: Edit Your robots.txt to Allow AI Crawlers

If your robots.txt is blocking AI crawlers (or all crawlers), here is how to fix it.

Option A: Allow All Crawlers (Recommended for Most Businesses)

The simplest setup that allows all crawlers, including AI bots, looks like this:

User-agent: * Disallow:

Leaving Disallow blank tells every crawler that it is welcome to access your entire site. This is the cleanest option if you have no sensitive pages to protect.

Option B: Allow All Crawlers But Block Specific Sections

If you want to protect certain areas (like a client portal, admin pages, or duplicate content), you can block only those:

User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /checkout/ Disallow: /thank-you/

This keeps your important content open while keeping sensitive or low-value pages out of the index.

Option C: Explicitly Allow Specific AI Crawlers

If your robots.txt currently blocks all bots with Disallow: / and you only want to open access to specific AI crawlers without changing your general settings, you can add explicit allow rules before the global block:

User-agent: GPTBot Disallow:

User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow:

User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Important: Order matters in robots.txt. Specific user-agent rules placed before a general wildcard rule take precedence for those named bots.

How to Edit Your robots.txt

• WordPress sites: Use a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. Both have a built-in robots.txt editor under their SEO settings. You can edit the file directly without touching code.
• Other platforms (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify): Each platform has its own settings panel. Search for “robots.txt” in your platform’s help documentation for the specific steps.
• Custom or developer-built sites: Access the file via FTP, cPanel File Manager, or your hosting control panel. The file lives in the root directory of your website.

Step 4: Check Your Meta Robots Tags

Robots.txt is not the only place that can block crawlers. Individual pages can also carry a meta robots tag inside the HTML that overrides your robots.txt settings for that specific page.

Look for this in the head section of your page’s HTML:

meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"

If a page has noindex, it will not be included in search results or AI indexes regardless of your robots.txt settings. If a page has nofollow, crawlers will not follow links from that page.

For most of your important pages (homepage, service pages, blog posts), you want:

meta name="robots" content="index, follow"

Or simply no meta robots tag at all, since index and follow are the default behavior.

In WordPress, Yoast SEO and Rank Math both let you check and set this on a per-page basis under the SEO panel on each post or page editor.

Step 5: Make Sure Your Site Has an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of your important pages and helps crawlers (including AI bots) discover your content faster and more completely. If you do not have one, you are relying on crawlers to find your pages by following links, which is slower and less reliable.

To check if you have a sitemap, visit: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you see a structured list of URLs, you are in good shape. If you get a 404 error, you need to create one.

For WordPress: Yoast SEO and Rank Math both generate sitemaps automatically. Just make sure the sitemap feature is turned on in the plugin settings.

For other platforms: Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify all generate sitemaps automatically. Check your platform’s settings to confirm it is enabled and accessible.

Once your sitemap exists, submit it to Google Search Console. While this is primarily a Google tool, getting Google to crawl and index your content is still one of the most reliable ways to get your content in front of AI systems that pull from Google’s index (like AI Overviews).

Step 6: Optimize Your Content for AI Understanding

Allowing AI crawlers to access your site is only half the battle. Once they can get in, you want your content to be easy to understand, authoritative, and citation-worthy.

Here are the content practices that tend to perform well in AI-generated answers:

• Answer specific questions clearly and directly. AI systems look for content that gives a clean, direct answer. If someone asks “how do I improve my website’s SEO,” your page should have a clear, readable answer near the top.
• Use structured formatting. Headers, numbered lists, and bullet points help AI systems parse your content. A wall of unformatted text is harder for both humans and machines to process.
• Establish expertise and authority. Include author information, credentials, and trust signals where relevant. AI systems increasingly prioritize content that demonstrates experience and authority.
• Keep your content accurate and up to date. Outdated or inaccurate information is less likely to be cited by AI tools. Review your key pages regularly.
• Use schema markup. Schema is structured data that tells search engines and AI systems exactly what type of content is on your page (a local business, a how-to article, an FAQ, etc.). This helps AI systems understand and categorize your content more accurately.

If you want to go deeper on content strategy, check out our content marketing services for a full breakdown of how we help businesses create content that ranks and gets cited.

Step 7: Add Your Site to AI Platform Indexes Directly

Some AI platforms offer direct ways to submit your content or register your website. While this space is still evolving, here are some options worth exploring:

• OpenAI: OpenAI does not currently offer a direct submission tool, but ensuring GPTBot is allowed in your robots.txt is the primary action you can take.
• Bing Webmaster Tools: Perplexity and several other AI tools draw from Bing’s index. Submitting your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools can improve your visibility in these systems.
• Google Search Console: As mentioned above, submitting your sitemap here helps ensure Google (and by extension, AI Overviews) has your content fully indexed.
• Perplexity: As of 2025, Perplexity has started offering publisher programs. Check their website for the latest on how to get your content included.

These steps work alongside your robots.txt settings, not instead of them.

Step 8: Monitor Your AI Visibility Over Time

Once your site is open to AI crawlers and your content is optimized, you will want to track whether it is actually making a difference. Traditional keyword ranking tools do not yet track AI citation visibility perfectly, but here are some practical approaches:

• Manually test AI tools. Search for questions your business should answer in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. See if your site gets mentioned or cited.
• Check Google Search Console for AI Overview impressions. Google has begun surfacing AI Overview data for some queries. Look for changes in impressions and clicks on key pages.
• Monitor referral traffic from AI platforms. In Google Analytics, check if you are receiving traffic from sources like perplexity.ai, chatgpt.com, or bing.com (which powers some AI tools).
• Track your overall organic visibility. Our SEO services include ongoing monitoring so you can see how your rankings and traffic evolve as AI search continues to grow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will allowing AI crawlers slow down my website?

Not in any meaningful way for most small business websites. AI crawlers are generally polite bots that follow crawl-delay settings and do not hammer servers. If you are on a very limited hosting plan and concerned about crawler traffic, you can add a Crawl-delay: 10 directive in your robots.txt to slow things down, but this is rarely necessary.

Should I be worried about AI scraping my content without credit?

This is a legitimate concern that many content creators and publishers are debating. For most local service businesses, the benefit of being visible in AI-generated answers far outweighs the risk of content being used without attribution. If you create highly proprietary content (like original research or premium courses), you may want to weigh this differently.

Does blocking AI crawlers hurt my regular Google SEO?

Blockers like Disallow: / in robots.txt will block Googlebot as well, which directly hurts your search rankings. More targeted blocks (like blocking GPTBot specifically) will not affect Googlebot, since they are separate crawlers. Always be specific about which crawler you are blocking.

How do I know if AI crawlers are actually visiting my site?

You can check your server access logs for bot user-agent strings like GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and others. Most hosting providers give you access to raw logs through cPanel or a similar dashboard. Alternatively, some SEO plugins display crawl data in a simplified format.

My site uses a page builder. Can I still edit robots.txt?

Yes. If your site is on WordPress, Yoast SEO and Rank Math both give you a robots.txt editor regardless of which page builder you use. For Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify, robots.txt editing access varies by plan, so check your platform documentation for the specific steps.

Conclusion

AI-powered search is not a future trend. It is already shaping how people find answers and discover businesses today. If your website is blocking AI crawlers, using aggressive noindex tags on important pages, or missing a sitemap, you are working against your own visibility at a time when the rules of online discovery are actively shifting.

The steps in this guide are not complicated, but they do require careful attention to avoid accidentally locking out the wrong bots or blocking content you want indexed. If you are unsure about your current setup or want a professional eye on your technical SEO, the team at Page1Design has been helping small businesses build better online visibility since 2019.

Reach out today for a free website audit and let us show you exactly where your site stands, and what it will take to get in front of both human searchers and AI systems.