Who blocks AI · #736 in the Majestic Million

robots.txt · checked 9 Nov 2026

Does thehill.com block AI crawlers?

Yes. thehill.com’s robots.txt blocks 9 of the 19 AI crawlers we track, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 6 more. Search engines such as Googlebot and Bingbot may crawl it.

GPTBotBlocked OAI-SearchBotBlocked ClaudeBotBlocked PerplexityBotBlocked Google-ExtendedAllowed CCBotBlocked

robots.txt: thehill.com/robots.txt · 137 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	Blocked	line 27 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: OAI-SearchBot`
`PerplexityBot`	Perplexity	Blocked	line 31 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: PerplexityBot`
`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	Blocked	line 27 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: GPTBot`
`ClaudeBot`	Anthropic	Blocked	line 49 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: ClaudeBot`
`Google-Extended`	Google	Allowed	line 44 · `Allow: /` under `User-agent: Google-Extended`
`CCBot`	Common Crawl	Blocked	line 55 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: CCBot`
`Applebot-Extended`	Apple	Blocked	line 70 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Applebot-Extended`
`GoogleOther`	Google	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Meta-ExternalAgent`	Meta	Blocked	line 112 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent`
`Bytespider`	ByteDance	Blocked	line 83 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: Bytespider`

User-triggered fetchers

Bot	Operator	robots.txt	Deciding line
`ChatGPT-User`	OpenAI	Blocked	line 86 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: ChatGPT-User`
`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	Blocked	line 70 · `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: AhrefsBot`
`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 thehill.com/robots.txt · 137 lines

1User-agent: *

2Disallow: /wp-admin/

3Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

5Sitemap: https://thehill.com/sitemap.xml

6Sitemap: https://thehill.com/news-sitemap.xml

7Sitemap: https://thehill.com/video-sitemap.xml

8Disallow: */?s=

9Disallow: */search/

10Disallow: /*.woff

11Disallow: /*.woff2

12Disallow: /page/

13Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

14Allow: /wp-content/plugins/liveblog/

15Disallow: /wp-content/client-mu-plugins/

16Disallow: /wp-includes/css/

17Disallow: /wp-includes/js/

18Disallow: /wp-content/themes/nexstar/client/build/js/

19Disallow: /wp-content/themes/nexstar/client/build/css/

20Disallow: /nxs-video-player/

23# --- (configured to see /advertise/ ONLY) ---

25User-agent: GPTBot

26User-agent: OAI-SearchBot

27Disallow: /

28Allow: /advertise/

30User-Agent: PerplexityBot

31Disallow: /

32Allow: /advertise/

34User-agent: AmazonAdBot

35Allow: /

37User-agent: carbon-umbrella-bot

38Allow: /

40User-agent: ia_archiver

41Disallow: /

43User-agent: Google-Extended

44Allow: /

46User-agent: ClaudeBot

47User-agent: Claude-Web

48User-agent: anthropic-ai

49Disallow: /

50Allow: /advertise/

52# --- Other Agents (Strict Block or Delays) ---

54User-agent: CCBot

55Disallow: /

57User-Agent: FacebookBot

58Disallow: /

60User-agent: proximic

61Crawl-Delay: 20

63User-agent: Moreover

64Crawl-Delay: 20

66User-agent: AhrefsBot

67Crawl-Delay: 20

69User-agent: Applebot-Extended

70Disallow: /

72User-agent: GumGum

73Crawl-Delay: 10

75User-agent: Verity

76Crawl-Delay: 10

78User-agent: AwarioRssBot

79User-agent: AwarioSmartBot

80Disallow: /

82User-agent: Bytespider

83Disallow: /

85User-agent: ChatGPT-User

86Disallow: /

88User-agent: cohere-ai

89Disallow: /

91User-agent: DataForSeoBot

92Disallow: /

94User-agent: Diffbot

95Disallow: /

97User-agent: FriendlyCrawler

98Disallow: /

100User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot

101Disallow: /

102Allow: /wirecutter/

103

104User-agent: ImagesiftBot

105Disallow: /

106

107User-agent: magpie-crawler

108Disallow: /

109

110User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent

111User-agent: meta-externalagent

112Disallow: /

113

114User-agent: NewsNow

115Disallow: /

116

117User-agent: news-please

118Disallow: /

119

120User-agent: omgili

121Disallow: /

122

123User-agent: omgilibot

124Disallow: /

125

126User-agent: peer39_crawler

127User-agent: peer39_crawler/1.0

128Disallow: /

129

130User-agent: Quora-Bot

131Disallow: /

132

133User-agent: Scrapy

134Disallow: /

135

136User-agent: TurnitinBot

137Disallow: /

What do the bots actually get?

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

History

19 October 2026: first checked.
2 November 2026: stopped blocking Google-Extended.

Questions

Does thehill.com block GPTBot?

Yes. thehill.com’s robots.txt disallows GPTBot from the whole site (line 27: Disallow: /). GPTBot is OpenAI’s crawler for training data; blocking it doesn’t affect ChatGPT search, which uses OAI-SearchBot. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does thehill.com block ClaudeBot?

Yes. thehill.com’s robots.txt disallows ClaudeBot from the whole site (line 49: Disallow: /). ClaudeBot is Anthropic’s crawler for training data. Checked 9 November 2026.

Does thehill.com block Google-Extended?

No. thehill.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 thehill.com block PerplexityBot?

Yes. thehill.com’s robots.txt disallows PerplexityBot from the whole site (line 31: Disallow: /). PerplexityBot is the crawler that indexes pages for Perplexity’s answers. Checked 9 November 2026.

Can ChatGPT search find thehill.com?

Not through its own crawler. thehill.com’s robots.txt disallows OAI-SearchBot from the whole site (line 27: Disallow: /). OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT search; blocking it keeps the site out of ChatGPT’s search answers. Checked 9 November 2026.