AI-Crawler Access Review (SOP)

Purpose

AI answer engines can only cite what their crawlers can reach, and misconfigured access quietly excludes a brand from AI search. This SOP ensures crawler permissions are deliberate, current and aligned with the visibility strategy.

When & who

Trigger

Quarterly review, or after any robots.txt, CDN or bot-management change.

Frequency

Quarterly

Roles

Technical SEO specialist, SEO lead, Web developer

Procedure

1. 1
   Inventory AI user agents

   List the current AI crawlers of interest, such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and ClaudeBot.

2. 2
   Review robots.txt directives

   Check which AI user agents are allowed or disallowed and confirm the rules match the intended visibility strategy.

3. 3
   Inspect edge and firewall rules

   Verify the CDN, WAF or bot manager is not silently blocking or rate-limiting legitimate AI crawlers.

4. 4
   Confirm access with logs

   Analyse server logs to confirm the intended AI crawlers are actually fetching key pages and returning 200 responses.

5. 5
   Assess llms.txt

   Decide whether to publish or update an llms.txt file to guide AI systems to your priority content.

6. 6
   Reconcile with strategy

   Where blocking is intentional, document the rationale, and where visibility is the goal, open access to the chosen agents.

7. 7
   Record and schedule review

   Log the configuration decisions and set the next quarterly review to keep pace with new crawlers.

Tools

• Server log files
• Cloudflare
• Google Search Console
• SearchScore Tracker