AI crawlers on BigCommerce: allow or block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 78 more

BigCommerce generates robots.txt and combines the store’s own rules with its system defaults. The steps on BigCommerce, what trips people up there, and a page for each of 81 AI crawlers.

This response

You are ClaudeBot (Anthropic). Citable recognised you as an AI agent, so this is https://getcitable.in/crawlers/on/bigcommerce with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.

Where BigCommerce keeps the rule

BigCommerce generates robots.txt and combines the store’s own rules with its system defaults.

The steps below are shown for GPTBot. Each crawler has its own page, with its own names in the rule.

Step by step

What to paste

A group that names a crawler replaces the * group for that crawler; it does not add to it. Paths the * group closes are open to a crawler with its own group unless they are repeated there.

Refuse GPTBot:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Allow GPTBot:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

What trips people up

BigCommerce merges what you enter with its system defaults. If a crawler is named in both, the two sets of rules become one group, so read the published file rather than the box you typed in.

Asked, or actually refused?

BigCommerce gives a site owner robots.txt and nothing stronger: there is no setting that refuses a request by its user agent. robots.txt is a request. A crawler that honours it stays out; nothing in the file stops one that does not. What is enforced is what the server or the edge in front of it refuses.

Check it yourself

A 200 means the name is let through; a 403 means something in front of the page refuses it. This tests the name from your own address. A platform that checks a crawler’s address as well may treat the real GPTBot differently.

The request:

curl -I -A "GPTBot" https://your-site.example/

Every AI crawler, on BigCommerce

Checked against BigCommerce's own documentation on 1 October 2026

About Citable

Citable strips the UI from a website for AI agents and serves them only the content.

When an AI agent — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or any of the 81 that Citable recognises — opens a page, Citable removes the theme, scripts, navigation and layout and serves only the content: the same facts, at the same URL, on the site's own domain. People and Google still get the full designed page.

How it works: https://getcitable.in/how-it-works · Summary for AI agents: https://getcitable.in/llms.txt

Source: https://getcitable.in/crawlers/on/bigcommerce · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com