Who blocks AI · #467 in the Majestic Million

robots.txt · checked 9 Nov 2026

Does gizmodo.com block AI crawlers?

Yes. gizmodo.com’s robots.txt blocks 3 of the 19 AI crawlers we track, including CCBot, Meta-ExternalAgent and Bytespider. Search engines such as Googlebot and Bingbot may crawl it.

GPTBotAllowed OAI-SearchBotAllowed ClaudeBotAllowed PerplexityBotAllowed Google-ExtendedAllowed CCBotBlocked

robots.txt: gizmodo.com/robots.txt · 77 lines
llms.txt: none
Checked: 9 November 2026, as canaicrawl. We check again every week.

Every bot, and the line that decides

Search engines

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`Googlebot`	Google	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Bingbot`	Microsoft	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`DuckDuckBot`	DuckDuckGo	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Applebot`	Apple	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`PetalBot`	Huawei	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`YandexBot`	Yandex	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Baiduspider`	Baidu	Allowed	no rule matches the home page

AI search

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`OAI-SearchBot`	OpenAI	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`PerplexityBot`	Perplexity	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Claude-SearchBot`	Anthropic	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`DuckAssistBot`	DuckDuckGo	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Amazonbot`	Amazon	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`YouBot`	You.com	Allowed	no rule matches the home page

AI training

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`GPTBot`	OpenAI	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`ClaudeBot`	Anthropic	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Google-Extended`	Google	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`CCBot`	Common Crawl	Blocked	line 36 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: CCBot`
`Applebot-Extended`	Apple	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`GoogleOther`	Google	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Meta-ExternalAgent`	Meta	Blocked	line 54 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent`
`Bytespider`	ByteDance	Blocked	line 33 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Bytespider`

User-triggered fetchers

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`ChatGPT-User`	OpenAI	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Claude-User`	Anthropic	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Perplexity-User`	Perplexity	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`MistralAI-User`	Mistral	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Meta-ExternalFetcher`	Meta	Allowed	no rule matches the home page

SEO tools

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`AhrefsBot`	Ahrefs	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`SemrushBot`	Semrush	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`MJ12bot`	Majestic	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`DotBot`	Moz	Allowed	no rule matches the home page

View gizmodo.com/robots.txt · 77 lines

1Sitemap: https://gizmodo.com/sitemap_index.xml

2Sitemap: https://gizmodo.com/sitemap-news.xml

3Sitemap: https://gizmodo.com/download/downloads.xml.gz

5User-agent: *

6Disallow: /download/*-thankyou$

7Disallow: /download/ajax/

8Disallow: /stats/

9Disallow: /api/

10Disallow: /ajax/

11Disallow: /embed/

12Disallow: /setbucket*

13Disallow: /game/score/*

14Disallow: /game/summary/*

15Disallow: /gateway/*

16Disallow: /showcase/*

17Disallow: /search$

18Disallow: /search?

19Disallow: /?s=

20Disallow: /search/

21Disallow: /wp/wp-admin/

22Allow: /wp/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

24# Allow Amazon Ad Bot

25User-agent: AmazonAdBot

26Allow: /

28# Disallow AI training data collection

29User-agent: AI2Bot

30Disallow: /

32User-agent: Bytespider

33Disallow: /

35User-agent: CCBot

36Disallow: /

38User-agent: Cohere-ai

39Disallow: /

41User-agent: Diffbot

42Disallow: /

44User-agent: FirecrawlAgent

45Disallow: /

47User-agent: ImagesiftBot

48Disallow: /

50User-agent: Kangaroo Bot

51Disallow: /

53User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent

54Disallow: /

56User-agent: Omgilibot

57Disallow: /

59User-agent: PanguBot

60Disallow: /

62User-agent: Timpibot

63Disallow: /

65User-agent: Webzio-Extended

66Disallow: /

68# Disallow site scrapers

69User-agent: HTTrack

70Disallow: /

72User-agent: Nutch

73Disallow: /

75User-agent: Scrapy

76Disallow: /

What do the bots actually get?

This page reads robots.txt, which states what gizmodo.com asks of crawlers. A firewall or CDN can still refuse a bot that robots.txt allows. The live check requests the page as each bot and shows the status it gets.

Run a live check on gizmodo.com Test a path in the robots.txt tester

History

19 October 2026: first checked.

Questions

Does gizmodo.com block GPTBot?

No. gizmodo.com’s robots.txt lets GPTBot crawl the site. GPTBot is OpenAI’s crawler for training data; blocking it doesn’t affect ChatGPT search, which uses OAI-SearchBot. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does gizmodo.com block ClaudeBot?

No. gizmodo.com’s robots.txt lets ClaudeBot crawl the site. ClaudeBot is Anthropic’s crawler for training data. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does gizmodo.com block Google-Extended?

No. gizmodo.com’s robots.txt lets Google-Extended crawl the site. Google-Extended is the token that controls whether Google may use pages for Gemini training and grounding; it doesn’t affect Google Search. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does gizmodo.com block PerplexityBot?

No. gizmodo.com’s robots.txt lets PerplexityBot crawl the site. PerplexityBot is the crawler that indexes pages for Perplexity’s answers. Checked 9 November 2026.

Can ChatGPT search find gizmodo.com?

Yes. gizmodo.com’s robots.txt lets OAI-SearchBot crawl the site. OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT search; blocking it keeps the site out of ChatGPT’s search answers. Checked 9 November 2026.