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

On Vercel robots.txt is part of the project: a file in public/, or whatever the framework generates. In front of the project sits the Firewall, which can refuse a crawler before the project is asked. The steps on Vercel, 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/vercel with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.

Where Vercel keeps the rule

On Vercel robots.txt is part of the project: a file in public/, or whatever the framework generates. In front of the project sits the Firewall, which can refuse a crawler before the project is asked.

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

The AI Bots Ruleset is one switch for every AI bot Vercel recognises, and Vercel keeps that list. On Deny it refuses all of them, and whether GPTBot is on that list is Vercel’s decision; a custom rule is the only control that names one crawler. It is off by default, shown in the dashboard as Allow.

Asked, or actually refused?

Yes. A Deny in the Firewall is answered by Vercel, before the project’s code runs.

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 Vercel

Checked against Vercel'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/vercel · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com