Allow or block Poseidon Research Crawler on Cloudflare: AI Crawl Control, the managed robots.txt, and a custom rule

Open AI Crawl Control for the domain, find Poseidon Research Crawler in the Crawlers table and set its Action to Block. If it is not listed, add a custom rule that blocks requests whose user agent contains “Poseidon Research Crawler”.

This response

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

Poseidon Research Crawler, and where Cloudflare keeps the rule

Poseidon Research Crawler is a crawler run by Poseidon Research. It reads pages ahead of time, to train a model or to build an index.

Cloudflare does not hold a site’s robots.txt; the origin does. But it can add to that file, and it can refuse a crawler before the origin is ever asked.

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.

A custom rule that blocks it (Security → WAF → Custom rules; action: Block):

(http.user_agent contains "Poseidon Research Crawler")

robots.txt at the origin, refusing Poseidon Research Crawler:

User-agent: Poseidon Research Crawler
Disallow: /

robots.txt at the origin, allowing Poseidon Research Crawler:

User-agent: Poseidon Research Crawler
Allow: /

What trips people up

The edge answers first. If Cloudflare blocks Poseidon Research Crawler, an Allow in robots.txt changes nothing: the crawler is refused before the origin is asked. A site that allows a crawler on paper and blocks it at the edge is a site that crawler never reads.

Asked, or actually refused?

Yes. A Block in AI Crawl Control or in a custom rule is answered by Cloudflare itself, and the request never reaches the origin.

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 Poseidon Research Crawler differently.

The request:

curl -I -A "Poseidon Research Crawler" https://your-site.example/

Questions

How do I block Poseidon Research Crawler on Cloudflare?

Open AI Crawl Control for the domain, find Poseidon Research Crawler in the Crawlers table and set its Action to Block. If it is not listed, add a custom rule that blocks requests whose user agent contains “Poseidon Research Crawler”.

How do I allow Poseidon Research Crawler on Cloudflare?

In AI Crawl Control set Poseidon Research Crawler to Allow, and check under Security → Settings that the AI bot setting is not blocking it.

Can Cloudflare actually stop Poseidon Research Crawler, or only ask it?

Yes. A Block in AI Crawl Control or in a custom rule is answered by Cloudflare itself, and the request never reaches the origin.

Does a rule for Poseidon Research Crawler affect Googlebot or my Google rankings?

No. Googlebot goes by its own name and follows its own rules; a group or a firewall rule for Poseidon Research Crawler does not apply to it.

Checked against Cloudflare's own documentation on 1 October 2026

Related

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/poseidon-research-crawler/cloudflare · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com