Best SEO Checklist
ONE FOCUSED ACTION

Allow AI assistant crawlers through robots.txt for inference and citation.

Answer engine optimization

1 checklist items

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    Why this matters

    AI assistants require crawler access granted via robots.txt to crawl and cite your pages in answers.

    A STARTING-POINT EXAMPLE

    Hypothetical standard operating procedure

    Adapt this example to your site, access, tools, and change process. It is our suggested procedure, informed by the sources below.

    1. Identify user-agent names for key AI crawlers (e.g., GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot).
    2. Inspect your robots.txt file for disallow directives affecting these crawlers.
    3. Add or update rules to explicitly allow these user-agents crawling permission to relevant paths.
    4. Test accessibility using robots.txt testing tools or crawler simulators for these AI bots.
    5. Monitor AI referral traffic and indexation reports post-update to confirm access.

    Watch for

    Blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt prevents citations, losing AI search visibility.

    Definition of done

    Robots.txt permits agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot to crawl priority content.

    Sources & attribution

    1. Answer Engine Optimization 1 AEO Toolkit ↗

    Original checklist wording and example SOP by Best SEO Checklist, using source-grounded AI assistance. Editorial contact: Ted Kubaitis, @tedkubaitis on Teams. Check current source guidance before implementation.