I tested 8,000 mid-ranked sites: 178 allow ChatGPT search or Perplexity in robots.txt and refuse requests that name them
This story is from 2026-09-26. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.
A robots.txt checker reads a file. A firewall rule that matches a crawler's user agent is invisible to it. On September 23 I ran the server side of that test on the top 5,000 sites: of 2,429 that allowed an AI search crawler, 56 (2.3%) refused it at the server. Those are large, well-known sites, so…
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- 2026-09-26 13:00 · DEV Community — AI
I tested 8,000 mid-ranked sites: 178 allow ChatGPT search or Perplexity in robots.txt and refuse requests that name them