Overview
Introduction
The last few years have added a whole new category of crawler to robots.txt: bots that feed AI model training pipelines or power live AI answer engines, each with its own user-agent name and no single settled convention for how to treat them.
This tool reads your existing robots.txt, tells you which known AI and search crawlers it already mentions, and generates a suggested policy plus an llms.txt starter file.
What Is AI Crawler Policy Generator?
A robots.txt analyzer and policy generator specifically for AI-related crawlers: it recognizes a list of known search crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, and others) and known AI crawlers, split into AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot) and AI search/answer crawlers (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot).
It also generates a starter llms.txt, the emerging convention for giving AI systems a quick, structured summary of your site.
How AI Crawler Policy Generator Works
Your pasted robots.txt is parsed into its User-agent blocks and their Allow/Disallow directives, then each block's user-agent name is matched (case-insensitively) against the known crawler list.
Based on the policy stance you choose, balanced (block AI training, allow AI search and traditional search), block all AI, or allow all, the tool generates a fresh Allow/Disallow block for every known crawler, and appends any unrecognized user-agent blocks from your original file unchanged so you don't lose custom rules.
When To Use AI Crawler Policy Generator
Use it when you want a deliberate, documented stance on AI crawlers instead of an accidental default (either wide open because you never thought about it, or unintentionally blocking a crawler that could send you traffic).
It's also useful for periodically re-checking your robots.txt as new AI crawler user-agents get introduced, the known-bot list here reflects the more established names as of when this tool was built.
Often used alongside Cloudflare Pages robots.txt Generator and Cloudflare Staging Domain Blocker.
Features
Advantages
- Classifies real, currently-known crawler user-agents instead of leaving you to research each one's purpose individually.
- Offers three clear policy stances instead of forcing an all-or-nothing choice.
- Preserves any unrecognized user-agent blocks from your original robots.txt rather than silently discarding custom rules.
Limitations
- The known-bot list isn't exhaustive and doesn't update automatically as companies introduce new crawler user-agents, treat it as a strong starting point, not a guaranteed-complete registry.
- robots.txt directives are respected voluntarily; this tool can't verify that any given crawler actually honors the rules it generates.
Examples
Best Practices & Notes
Best Practices
- Revisit this policy periodically, new AI crawler user-agents are introduced faster than most sites update their robots.txt.
- If you rely on organic traffic from AI answer engines, lean toward allowing AI search/answer crawlers even if you block AI training crawlers.
- Fill in the llms.txt skeleton's Docs section with your actual highest-value pages rather than leaving it as generic placeholder links.
Developer Notes
The known-bot table is a small hardcoded array of { userAgent, category, owner } records checked case-insensitively against parsed User-agent lines; the parser splits on blank/comment-stripped lines and groups Allow/Disallow directives under the most recent User-agent line, matching robots.txt's actual block-based structure rather than a stricter per-directive format.
AI Crawler Policy Generator Use Cases
- Deciding and documenting a deliberate AI-crawler stance for a new or existing site
- Auditing an existing robots.txt to see which known AI crawlers it already mentions and what their current rule is
- Bootstrapping an llms.txt file alongside an AI crawler policy update
Common Mistakes
- Blocking every AI-sounding user-agent indiscriminately, including AI search/answer crawlers that could otherwise send you attributed traffic.
- Assuming a robots.txt rule retroactively removes content already absorbed into a model's training data from a prior, unblocked crawl.
Tips
- Combine this tool's output with the general robots.txt Generator's private-path Disallow rows if you also need to exclude specific internal paths alongside your AI crawler policy.