Cloudflare's AI crawler block misses ChatGPT search bot and Perplexity entirely

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Cloudflare's managed robots.txt feature, marketed as blocking AI crawlers, names eight user agents that cover training and grounding bots but omits the search-facing crawlers that determine whether ChatGPT or Perplexity actually cites a website. For instance, GPTBot — which governs OpenAI training data — is blocked, while OAI-SearchBot, which drives ChatGPT search results, is left untouched; the same training-versus-search split applies to Claude and Applebot. Perplexity's crawler does not appear in the block at all, despite Cloudflare's documentation implying the setting keeps AI systems away from content. Google-Extended, also included in the block, explicitly does not affect Google Search rankings or inclusion in AI Overviews, according to Google's own crawler documentation. Controlling what appears in Google's AI Overviews actually requires standard snippet directives like nosnippet or noindex applied to Googlebot — a trade-off Google states clearly but that is rarely highlighted in SEO discussions.

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