Gated whitepaper
The AI Crawler Access Checklist
For ecommerce leaders, technical SEO teams, and catalog owners deciding how AI crawlers should access product pages.
Summary
AI crawler access is no longer a generic robots.txt question. Product catalogs now get visited by search bots, AI answer engines, shopping agents, training crawlers, preview fetchers, and monitoring tools that all look similar in logs but create different business outcomes. Blocking everything can protect content while making products invisible in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI experiences, and agentic commerce. Allowing everything can expose thin, duplicated, or stale catalog facts that engines should not cite. This checklist gives catalog, SEO, ecommerce, and legal teams a practical decision framework for AI crawler governance: which bots deserve full access, which should be monitored, where rate limits make sense, and what product-data quality bar should exist before a crawler can safely read a page. The page you are reading is only the summary; the PDF contains the crawler-by-crawler access matrix and audit worksheet.
What's inside
- The keep, block, monitor, or throttle decision card for major AI crawlers including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and Applebot-Extended.
- A robots.txt and WAF audit path that separates AI training, AI search retrieval, and ordinary search indexing.
- The catalog-data checks crawlers need before product facts are safe to cite in answer engines.
- A governance worksheet for legal, SEO, ecommerce, and data teams to agree on crawler policy.
- GA4 and server-log signals that show whether AI access changes discovery or conversion quality.