Should you block AI crawlers?

It depends on your goals.

• You may want to block them if you have proprietary content, don’t want AI training on your work, or are worried about AI-generated competition.
• You may want to allow them if you want AI assistants to reference your site, link back to your content, or improve visibility in AI-powered search tools.

AI training crawlers vs AI assistant crawlers

• AI training crawlers download content to train models. Your content becomes part of the model’s knowledge.
• AI assistant crawlers fetch content on demand when users ask questions. These usually show links and citations back to your site.

Can you block some crawlers and allow others?

Yes. robots.txt works per user-agent, so you can block AI training bots while still allowing Google and Bing.