Blocking OpenAI Bard crawlers

Jatin Khosla

7 min read

When and how to block OpenAI and Bard crawlers from a website.

The powerful capabilities of AI software like ChatGPT and Bard to be able to create human like content, answer questions or write code are built by training massive large language models (LLMs) by crawling websites at internet scale.

Traffic from bots is shown under Visitor Analytics for Konigle hosted websites.
Traffic from bots is shown under Visitor Analytics for Konigle hosted websites.

But crawling websites is not a recent phenomenon, search engines like Google, Bing or even SEO software like Ahrefs work due to crawling. Crawling has enabled content on a website to be discovered by search engines. It has enabled SEO, website security and now LLM powered AI Chatbots.

Top 10 active crawlers in the world according to Cloudflare
Top 10 active crawlers in the world according to Cloudflare

To recap a robots.txt file is a de facto standard of letting a crawler know if it is allowed to crawl a website or its parts. We can use the robots.txt file to block access to an entire website or the specific folders.

If you want to read in more detail about the robots.txt file, you can read it here : What is robots.txt ?.

To completely block the OpenAI crawler, you can add  the following two lines to your robots.txt file

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

If you would like fine grained control and allow only specific folders to be blocked for AI crawlers on your website, you can use the robots.txt generator tool as shown below.

You can use the robots.txt tool to generate a robots.txt file to block AI crawlers
You can use the robots.txt tool to generate a robots.txt file to block AI crawlers

Author

Jatin Khosla

Co-founder, Konigle

Jatin is dedicated to building a vibrant and secure internet for anyone anywhere to participate in profitably. His other interests are to eradicate littering and building the most efficient motors.

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