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Cannot Reliably Block AI Crawlers Because Bots Ignore robots.txt and Disguise Themselves as Browsers

1 mentionsScore 8.1r/seo
technical SEOrobots.txtAI crawlersbot blockingserver resourcesdata accuracy

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Summary

Website owners and SEOs are discovering that robots.txt and user-agent blocking are effectively useless against modern AI crawlers. Controlled testing revealed that ChatGPT skipped robots.txt entirely on first visit, Gemini sent a user agent literally labeled 'Google' from non-Google IP ranges, and Grok hammered pages from 59 different IPs over 6 requests — all claiming to be Chrome or Safari, many routed through proxy services like Oxylabs. Blocking by user agent 'only stops the bots that tell you their name.' This is a severe, unsolved technical SEO and server-resource problem: site owners burn bandwidth, get scraped without consent, suffer inflated analytics, and have no trustworthy way to audit which bots are actually hitting their site versus which are spoofed. Existing SEO checkers do not surface or validate real bot behavior, leaving this gap wide open and highly painful for agencies and site owners.

Reddit context (brief)

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    Website owners cannot reliably block AI crawlers via robots.txt or user-agent rules because many bots ignore robots.txt and disguise themselves as Chrome or Safari.

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Related angle: Cannot Reliably Block AI Crawlers Because Bots Ignore robots.txt and Disguise Themselves as Browsers

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Context: r/seo

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