Agentic web census · AI access lookup · rank #157 · fetched 2026-09-30
Can AI assistants read nytimes.com?
nytimes.com's robots.txt tells ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity not to open its pages, even when a user asks. (robots.txt served from www.nytimes.com)
- Training crawlers blocked: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Bytespider, Applebot-Extended, meta-externalagent, anthropic-ai, cohere-ai
- llms.txt: not published
- A2A agent card: not published
- security.txt: published
| AI agent | Operator and purpose | robots.txt verdict |
|---|---|---|
| User-triggered assistants | ||
| ChatGPT-User (named) | OpenAI (a user asked ChatGPT to open a page) | blocked |
| Claude-User (named) | Anthropic (a user asked Claude to open a page) | blocked |
| Perplexity-User (named) | Perplexity (a user asked Perplexity to open a page) | blocked |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral (user-requested fetch) | partly blocked |
| DuckAssistBot (named) | DuckDuckGo (DuckAssist answers) | blocked |
| Search crawlers | ||
| OAI-SearchBot (named) | OpenAI (ChatGPT search) | blocked |
| Claude-SearchBot (named) | Anthropic (Claude search) | blocked |
| PerplexityBot (named) | Perplexity (search index) | blocked |
| Googlebot (named) | Google Search | partly blocked |
| Bingbot | Microsoft Bing (also feeds ChatGPT search) | partly blocked |
| Training crawlers | ||
| GPTBot (named) | OpenAI (training) | blocked |
| ClaudeBot (named) | Anthropic (training) | blocked |
| Google-Extended (named) | Google (Gemini training and grounding control) | blocked |
| CCBot (named) | Common Crawl (open dataset used to train many models) | blocked |
| Bytespider (named) | ByteDance | blocked |
| Applebot-Extended (named) | Apple (AI training control) | blocked |
| meta-externalagent (named) | Meta (AI crawler) | blocked |
| anthropic-ai (named) | Anthropic (legacy token) | blocked |
| cohere-ai (named) | Cohere | blocked |
| Amazonbot (named) | Amazon | partly blocked |
"Blocked" means the site's robots.txt disallows the whole site for that agent, by name or through the * group. It is a request: OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply to user-initiated ChatGPT requests, and sites can also block agents at the network edge, which robots.txt does not show.
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