The State of AI Crawler Permissions

A BotWitness report — how the web's most-visited sites treat AI crawlers, measured daily from robots.txt / llms.txt. Updated 2026-07-09T19:42:39Z.

76% of 38 tracked sites block Bytespider from their whole site.

Who blocks which AI crawler

AI crawlerSites blocking at rootShare
Bytespider29 of 38 (76%)
CCBot29 of 38 (76%)
ClaudeBot27 of 38 (71%)
Applebot-Extended26 of 38 (68%)
Diffbot26 of 38 (68%)
PerplexityBot25 of 38 (66%)
anthropic-ai24 of 38 (63%)
cohere-ai23 of 38 (60%)
Meta-ExternalAgent22 of 38 (58%)
Claude-SearchBot21 of 38 (55%)
Google-Extended21 of 38 (55%)
Amazonbot20 of 38 (53%)
Perplexity-User20 of 38 (53%)
TimpiBot20 of 38 (53%)
FacebookBot19 of 38 (50%)
Omgilibot18 of 38 (47%)
GPTBot16 of 38 (42%)
ChatGPT-User14 of 38 (37%)
YouBot14 of 38 (37%)
ImagesiftBot13 of 38 (34%)
OAI-SearchBot8 of 38 (21%)

llms.txt adoption

3 of 39 tracked sites publish an llms.txt.

Coverage: 39 domains, 117 snapshots, 207 checks; archive since 2026-07-09T19:41:24Z. Each capture is SHA-256 hashed and RFC-3161 timestamped. Point-in-time and certified records at https://bot-witness.com.