Who blocks AI · #1254 in the Majestic Million

robots.txt · checked 9 Nov 2026

Does thebalancemoney.com block AI crawlers?

Yes. thebalancemoney.com’s robots.txt blocks 15 of the 19 AI crawlers we track, including ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and 12 more. It also blocks PetalBot and Baiduspider among search engines.

GPTBotPartly blocked OAI-SearchBotPartly blocked ClaudeBotBlocked PerplexityBotBlocked Google-ExtendedBlocked CCBotBlocked

robots.txt: www.thebalancemoney.com/robots.txt · 118 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	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: PetalBot`
`YandexBot`	Yandex	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Baiduspider`	Baidu	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Baiduspider`

AI search

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`OAI-SearchBot`	OpenAI	Partly blocked	line 30 · `Disallow: /thmb/`
`PerplexityBot`	Perplexity	Blocked	line 40 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: PerplexityBot`
`Claude-SearchBot`	Anthropic	Blocked	line 40 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Claude-SearchBot`
`DuckAssistBot`	DuckDuckGo	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: DuckAssistBot`
`Amazonbot`	Amazon	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Amazonbot`
`YouBot`	You.com	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: YouBot`

AI training

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`GPTBot`	OpenAI	Partly blocked	line 30 · `Disallow: /thmb/`
`ClaudeBot`	Anthropic	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: ClaudeBot`
`Google-Extended`	Google	Blocked	line 40 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Google-Extended`
`CCBot`	Common Crawl	Blocked	line 40 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: CCBot`
`Applebot-Extended`	Apple	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Applebot-Extended`
`GoogleOther`	Google	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Meta-ExternalAgent`	Meta	Blocked	line 40 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent`
`Bytespider`	ByteDance	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Bytespider`

User-triggered fetchers

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`ChatGPT-User`	OpenAI	Partly blocked	line 30 · `Disallow: /thmb/`
`Claude-User`	Anthropic	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Claude-User`
`Perplexity-User`	Perplexity	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Perplexity-User`
`MistralAI-User`	Mistral	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: MistralAI-user`
`Meta-ExternalFetcher`	Meta	Blocked	line 114 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher`

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 www.thebalancemoney.com/robots.txt · 118 lines

1#People Inc. content is made available for your non-commercial use subject to our

2#Terms of Use here: https://www.people.inc/brands-termsofservice.

3#Use of any crawler or other tool, device, or process to data mine or scrape the

4#content on this website using automated means for any purpose other than

5#directing traffic to this website or serving authorized advertisements on this

6#website is prohibited without prior written permission from People Inc.

7#Prohibited uses include but are not limited to:

8#(1) text and data mining activities under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on

9#Copyright in the Digital Single Market;

10#(2) development or operation of any artificial intelligence, machine learning,

11#or large language model (LLM) technology, including by training or fine-tuning

12#such technology or using it for retrieval-augmented generation; and

13#(3) creating data sets containing People Inc. content or sharing it with others.

14#For the avoidance of doubt, the fact that any such tool, device, or process is

15#not blocked via this robots.txt file does not constitute a waiver of any of

16#People Inc.'s rights under our Terms of Use or relevant law.

17#Contact People Inc - Content Licensing contentlicensing@people.inc for assistance.

19User-agent: *

20Disallow: /embed?

21Disallow: /cdn-cgi/

23User-agent: Pinterest

24User-agent: Pinterestbot

25Disallow:

27User-agent: ChatGPT-User

28User-agent: OAI-SearchBot

29User-agent: GPTBot

30Disallow: /thmb/

32User-agent: Google-Extended

33User-agent: anthropic-ai

34User-agent: CCBot

35User-agent: Claude-SearchBot

36User-agent: cohere-ai

37User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent

38User-agent: meta-webindexer

39User-agent: PerplexityBot

40Disallow: /

41Allow: */presented/

42Allow: */integrated/

44User-agent: AmazonAdBot

45Allow: /

47User-agent: amazon-kendra

48User-agent: Amazonbot

49User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot

50User-agent: Amzn-User

51User-agent: AmazonBuyForMe

52User-agent: Applebot-Extended

53User-agent: archive.org_bot

54User-agent: Arquivo-web-crawler

55User-agent: AwarioRssBot

56User-agent: AwarioSmartBot

57User-agent: Baiduspider

58User-agent: Baiduspider-ads

59User-agent: Baiduspider-cpro

60User-agent: Baiduspider-favo

61User-agent: Baiduspider-image

62User-agent: Baiduspider-news

63User-agent: Baiduspider-video

64User-agent: Bravebot

65User-agent: Brightbot 1.0

66User-agent: Bytespider

67User-agent: Claude-User

68User-agent: Claude-Web

69User-agent: ClaudeBot

70User-agent: cohere-training-data-crawler

71User-agent: Diffbot-User

72User-agent: Diffbot

73User-agent: DuckAssistBot

74User-agent: ERNIEBot

75User-agent: ExaSearchBot

76User-agent: FacebookBot

77User-agent: FirecrawlAgent

78User-agent: FriendlyCrawler

79User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot

80User-agent: heritrix

81User-agent: iAskBot

82User-agent: iaskspider

83User-agent: iaskspider/2.0

84User-agent: ImagesiftBot

85User-agent: imageSpider

86User-agent: ISSCyberRiskCrawler

87User-agent: Kagibot

88User-agent: LinerBot

89User-agent: LinkUpBot

90User-agent: Mastodon

91User-agent: Meltwaterimageservice

92User-agent: MeltwaterNews

93User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher

94User-agent: MistralAI-Index

95User-agent: MistralAI-user

96User-agent: MistralAI-User/1.0

97User-agent: Neevabot

98User-agent: news-please

99User-agent: omgili

100User-agent: omgilibot

101User-agent: Perplexity-User

102User-agent: PetalBot

103User-agent: Quora-Bot

104User-agent: Shap-User

105User-agent: ShapBot

106User-agent: TaraGroup Intelligent Bot

107User-agent: Timpibot

108User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler

109User-agent: VettedAiBot

110User-agent: Webzio

111User-agent: Webzio-Extended

112User-agent: Yisouspider

113User-agent: YouBot

114Disallow: /

115

116Sitemap: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/sitemap.xml

117Sitemap: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/google-news-sitemap.xml

118

What do the bots actually get?

This page reads robots.txt, which states what thebalancemoney.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 thebalancemoney.com Test a path in the robots.txt tester

History

19 October 2026: first checked.

Questions

Does thebalancemoney.com block GPTBot?

Partly. thebalancemoney.com’s robots.txt keeps GPTBot out of some paths, such as /thmb/, and lets it crawl the rest. GPTBot is OpenAI’s crawler for training data; blocking it doesn’t affect ChatGPT search, which uses OAI-SearchBot. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does thebalancemoney.com block ClaudeBot?

Yes. thebalancemoney.com’s robots.txt disallows ClaudeBot from the whole site (line 114: Disallow: /). ClaudeBot is Anthropic’s crawler for training data. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does thebalancemoney.com block Google-Extended?

Yes. thebalancemoney.com’s robots.txt disallows Google-Extended from the whole site (line 40: Disallow: /). 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 thebalancemoney.com block PerplexityBot?

Yes. thebalancemoney.com’s robots.txt disallows PerplexityBot from the whole site (line 40: Disallow: /). PerplexityBot is the crawler that indexes pages for Perplexity’s answers. Checked 9 November 2026.

Can ChatGPT search find thebalancemoney.com?

Partly. thebalancemoney.com’s robots.txt keeps OAI-SearchBot out of some paths, such as /thmb/, and lets it crawl the rest. OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT search; blocking it keeps the site out of ChatGPT’s search answers. Checked 9 November 2026.