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

WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt when there is no robots.txt file in the site’s root. Once a file exists the web server answers with it, and WordPress is never asked. The steps on WordPress, 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/wordpress with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.

Where WordPress keeps the rule

WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt when there is no robots.txt file in the site’s root. Once a file exists the web server answers with it, and WordPress is never 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: /

The same refusal, through WordPress’s robots_txt filter:

add_filter( 'robots_txt', function ( $output, $public ) {
    $output .= "\nUser-agent: GPTBot\nDisallow: /\n";
    return $output;
}, 10, 2 );

What trips people up

A robots.txt file in the root wins. While it exists, a plugin’s editor and the robots_txt filter change nothing a crawler will see. Yoast’s File Editor is also absent when the install has file editing disabled.

Asked, or actually refused?

WordPress itself refuses nobody by user agent. A refusal that is enforced is made by the web server in front of it; see GPTBot on Apache or on Nginx, whichever the host 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 WordPress

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