AI Crawler Access and Robots Strategy
Distinguishing, at the robots file and firewall level, between crawlers that harvest content for model training and crawlers that retrieve pages in order to cite them in an answer.
Analogy Mental model
A bookshop that wants to turn away the people photocopying stock to resell it, while rolling out a carpet for the guide who brings paying customers in and tells the whole city where the shop is.
In practice What you actually do
The catastrophic error here is a one-click block on all AI traffic, which shuts out the retrieval crawlers and makes the brand vanish from every assistant at once. For anyone selling products or services, the correct posture is to allow everything, including the named search crawlers of every major provider.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Blocking training crawlers only makes sense for publishers whose business is licensing text. For a company selling goods, software, or services, having your documentation absorbed by every model is the objective, not the threat.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →