Does www.gov.uk block AI crawlers?

No. www.gov.uk’s robots.txt lets all 19 AI crawlers we track crawl the site, though it keeps Meta-ExternalAgent out of some paths. Search engines such as Googlebot and Bingbot may crawl it.

GPTBotAllowed OAI-SearchBotAllowed ClaudeBotAllowed PerplexityBotAllowed Google-ExtendedAllowed CCBotAllowed

robots.txt: www.gov.uk/robots.txt · 27 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	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Applebot-Extended`	Apple	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`GoogleOther`	Google	Allowed	no rule matches the home page
`Meta-ExternalAgent`	Meta	Partly blocked	line 10 · `Disallow: /search/all*`
`Bytespider`	ByteDance	Allowed	no rule matches the home page

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	Blocked	line 20 · `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 www.gov.uk/robots.txt · 27 lines

1User-agent: *

2Disallow: /*/print$

3# Don't allow indexing of site search

4Disallow: /search/all*

5Sitemap: https://www.gov.uk/sitemap.xml

7# The Meta-ExternalAgent crawler crawls the web for use cases such as training foundation AI models.

8# It results in timeouts from Vertex that back up requests from users making genuine searches

9User-agent: meta-externalagent

10Disallow: /search/all*

12# https://ahrefs.com/robot/ crawls the site frequently

13User-agent: AhrefsBot

14Crawl-delay: 10

16# https://www.deepcrawl.com/bot/ makes lots of requests. Ideally we'd slow it

17# down rather than blocking it but it doesn't mention whether or not it

18# supports crawl-delay.

19User-agent: deepcrawl

20Disallow: /

22# Complaints of 429 'Too many requests' seem to be coming from SharePoint servers

23# (https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/3ea268ed-58a6-4166-ab40-d3f4fc55fef4)

24# The robot doesn't recognise its User-Agent string, see the MS support article:

25# https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3019711/the-sharepoint-server-crawler-ignores-directives-in-robots-txt

26User-agent: MS Search 6.0 Robot

27Disallow: /

What do the bots actually get?

This page reads robots.txt, which states what www.gov.uk 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 www.gov.uk Test a path in the robots.txt tester

History

19 October 2026: first checked.

Questions

Does www.gov.uk block GPTBot?

No. www.gov.uk’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 www.gov.uk block ClaudeBot?

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

Does www.gov.uk block Google-Extended?

No. www.gov.uk’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 www.gov.uk block PerplexityBot?

No. www.gov.uk’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 www.gov.uk?

Yes. www.gov.uk’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.