AI access report
mashable.com
Blocks 15 of 24 answer engines, blocks 19 training crawlers, refuses AI user agents at the edge.
6 failing
4 partial
17 passing
Scanned 1 hour ago · 2 scans on record
Reach
19.9
/ 40
Whether AI crawlers and answer-engine fetchers are permitted to request the page at all, in robots.txt, in robots directives, and at the edge.
Readability
18
/ 25
Whether a fetcher that does not execute JavaScript receives the actual content, in markup an extractor can segment.
Structure
20
/ 20
Machine-readable markup that states the page's type, entities, canonical URL, and discrete facts instead of leaving them to be inferred.
Attribution
4
/ 15
Signals that let an answer engine name the author, date the content, resolve the publisher, and cite it under known terms.
Who is allowed to read this site 15 of 24 answer engines blocked
| Crawler | Operator | Uses content for | robots.txt | Live request |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPTBot Crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's generative AI foundation models. |
OpenAI | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
refused 403 |
| OAI-SearchBot Indexes pages so they can be surfaced and cited in ChatGPT search results, not for training. |
OpenAI | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
refused 403 |
| ChatGPT-User Fetches a page when a ChatGPT user or GPT Action asks for it; user-initiated, so robots rules may not apply. |
OpenAI | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| OAI-AdsBot Visits pages submitted as ChatGPT ads to check policy compliance and ad relevance; not used for model training. |
OpenAI | Live retrieval | allowed | not probed |
| ClaudeBot Collects web content that may contribute to training Anthropic's models; honors Crawl-delay. |
Anthropic | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
refused 403 |
| Claude-User Retrieves pages on demand when a Claude user's question needs live web content. |
Anthropic | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Claude-SearchBot Indexes content to improve the relevance and accuracy of Claude's search results. |
Anthropic | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| anthropic-ai Legacy token widely blocked for Anthropic training; Anthropic now documents ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot. |
Anthropic | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Google-Extended Control token with no user agent of its own; governs Gemini training and grounding use of Googlebot data. |
Model training | allowed | not probed | |
| Googlebot Crawls and renders pages for Google Search, Images, Video, News and Discover. |
Answer index | allowed | not probed | |
| Googlebot-News Robots token controlling Google News inclusion; crawling itself uses the Googlebot user agents. |
Answer index | allowed | not probed | |
| Google-CloudVertexBot Crawls sites at a site owner's request to build Vertex AI agents; no effect on Google Search. |
Live retrieval | allowed | not probed | |
| GoogleOther Generic Google crawler used by product teams for one-off fetches such as internal research and development. |
Model training | allowed | not probed | |
| Applebot Crawls for Siri, Spotlight and Safari search; falls back to Googlebot rules and ignores Crawl-delay. |
Apple | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Applebot-Extended Control token with no user agent; disallowing it excludes crawled content from Apple foundation model training. |
Apple | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Bingbot Indexes pages for Bing search and the Copilot answers that are grounded in the Bing index. |
Microsoft | Answer index | allowed | not probed |
| msnbot Legacy Microsoft search crawler token still honored alongside bingbot. |
Microsoft | Answer index | allowed | not probed |
| PerplexityBot Indexes and links pages in Perplexity search results; not used to collect foundation model training data. |
Perplexity | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
refused 403 |
| Perplexity-User ignores robots Fetches a page for a specific user question; Perplexity documents that it generally ignores robots.txt. |
Perplexity | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Meta-ExternalAgent Crawls the web to train Meta's foundation AI models and to index content directly into products. |
Meta | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher ignores robots Fetches individual links for agentic AI tasks; Meta documents that it may bypass robots.txt. |
Meta | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| FacebookBot Crawls public pages to improve language models behind Meta's speech recognition technology. |
Meta | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Meta-WebIndexer Indexes pages so Meta AI can cite and link them in its search answers. |
Meta | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Meta-ExternalAds Crawls the web to improve Meta's advertising and other business products and services. |
Meta | Model training | allowed | not probed |
| facebookexternalhit ignores robots Fetches shared links for Facebook, Instagram and Messenger previews; may bypass robots.txt for integrity checks. |
Meta | Live retrieval | allowed | not probed |
| Bytespider ignores robots Downloads content to train ByteDance LLMs and is widely reported to ignore robots.txt directives. |
ByteDance | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| TikTokSpider ignores robots Fetches shared URLs for TikTok link previews and feeds; not expected to follow robots.txt. |
ByteDance | Live retrieval | allowed | not probed |
| Amazonbot Crawls for Amazon product and Alexa answers and may use the content to train Amazon AI models. |
Amazon | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Amzn-SearchBot Indexes content for Amazon search experiences such as Alexa; does not crawl for generative AI training. |
Amazon | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Amzn-User ignores robots Fetches live pages to answer a user's Alexa question; Amazon documents it may not follow all robots.txt rules. |
Amazon | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| CCBot Builds the open Common Crawl web archive, a common source of LLM pretraining corpora. |
Common Crawl Foundation | Archive | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Diffbot Extracts structured page data for Diffbot's knowledge graph, which is licensed to AI customers. |
Diffbot | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| omgili Collects forum, news and blog content that Webz.io sells as web data feeds, including for AI training. |
Webz.io | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| omgilibot Legacy Omgili search crawler token still blocked alongside the current omgili agent. |
Webz.io | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| AI2Bot Collects web text for Ai2's open datasets used to train open language models such as OLMo. |
Allen Institute for AI | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| cohere-ai Retrieves pages to answer user-initiated prompts in Cohere's enterprise AI products. |
Cohere | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| cohere-training-data-crawler Downloads training data for the large language models behind Cohere's enterprise AI products. |
Cohere | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| MistralAI-User Fetches pages on demand so Mistral's Vibe assistant can answer a question with live, cited web content. |
Mistral AI | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| MistralAI-Index Indexes content for Mistral search behind Vibe answers; not used for generative AI training. |
Mistral AI | Answer index | allowed | not probed |
| MistralAI-Training Crawls web content to build datasets for training Mistral's generative AI models. |
Mistral AI | Model training | allowed | not probed |
| DuckAssistBot Crawls pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's cited AI-assisted answers; not used for model training. |
DuckDuckGo | Live retrieval | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| YouBot Indexes pages for You.com search results and the AI answers built on that index. |
You.com | Answer index | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| PanguBot Collects web content used to train Huawei's PanGu family of large models. |
Huawei | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Timpibot Crawls pages for Timpi's decentralized index, which is also used as LLM training data. |
Timpi | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| ImagesiftBot Downloads public images plus surrounding text to build ImageSift's searchable image index. |
ImageSift (Hive) | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Kangaroo Bot Scrapes site content into datasets used to train the Kangaroo LLM. |
Kangaroo LLM | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| SemrushBot-OCOB Crawls pages to feed Semrush's ContentShake AI writing tool. |
Semrush | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
| Scrapy Generic scraping framework often used to build AI training datasets; obeys robots.txt only when ROBOTSTXT_OBEY is on. |
Zyte (open-source framework) | Model training | blocked Disallow: / |
not probed |
Two of these columns matter differently. robots.txt is what the site declares. Live request is what actually happened when we sent a real request using that crawler's user agent from a datacentre IP, which is how edge blocking, rate limits and challenge pages show up even when robots.txt looks permissive.
Reach 19.9 / 40
✗
Answer-engine fetchers are blocked, so you cannot be cited
Blocked from citing you: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Applebot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Meta-ExternalFetcher, Meta-WebIndexer, Amzn-SearchBot, Amzn-User, cohere-ai, MistralAI-User, DuckAssistBot, YouBot.
Why it matters. Retrieval fetchers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User) load a page at answer time to quote and link it. When robots.txt disallows them the assistant drops the URL from its candidate set, so the citation goes to a competitor while your training exposure stays exactly the same.
Fix. Separate the two crawler classes in robots.txt instead of blocking by vendor. Allow `OAI-SearchBot` and `ChatGPT-User` (OpenAI retrieval and user-initiated fetches), `Claude-SearchBot` and `Claude-User` (Anthropic retrieval), and `PerplexityBot` and `Perplexity-User`; keep any opt-out you want on `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `CCBot`, `Google-Extended`, and `Applebot-Extended`. Order does not decide precedence in RFC 9309 parsers, the longest matching rule does, so make the allow rules at least as specific as the disallow rules. Blocking retrieval buys nothing on training, because the training crawlers are separate user agents with separate rules.
Fix. Separate the two crawler classes in robots.txt instead of blocking by vendor. Allow `OAI-SearchBot` and `ChatGPT-User` (OpenAI retrieval and user-initiated fetches), `Claude-SearchBot` and `Claude-User` (Anthropic retrieval), and `PerplexityBot` and `Perplexity-User`; keep any opt-out you want on `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `CCBot`, `Google-Extended`, and `Applebot-Extended`. Order does not decide precedence in RFC 9309 parsers, the longest matching rule does, so make the allow rules at least as specific as the disallow rules. Blocking retrieval buys nothing on training, because the training crawlers are separate user agents with separate rules.
# Retrieval and citation fetchers: allowed.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
# Training and dataset crawlers: disallowed.
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /checkout
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml12 pt
✗
Edge returns 403, 429, or a challenge to AI user agents
Requests identifying as gptbot, oai-searchbot, perplexitybot, claudebot were refused at the edge (HTTP 403 Forbidden; HTTP 403 Forbidden; HTTP 403 Forbidden; HTTP 403 Forbidden).
Why it matters. A permissive robots.txt is irrelevant if the edge answers an AI user agent with 403, 429, or a JavaScript challenge. Retrieval fetchers do not solve interstitials, so the assistant records a fetch failure and answers from another source.
Fix. Fetch the page with each AI user agent string and compare the status and byte count against a browser request. On Cloudflare, check whether the "Block AI bots" toggle in AI Crawl Control, a Bot Fight Mode rule, or a WAF custom rule on `cf.verified_bot_category` is catching the request, then narrow it: block the training category and add a skip rule for the retrieval agents you want citing you. Verified bots must not be handed Managed Challenge, since a challenge is a hard failure for a non-browser client. Re-test after every WAF or bot-management change, because these toggles are applied zone-wide.
Fix. Fetch the page with each AI user agent string and compare the status and byte count against a browser request. On Cloudflare, check whether the "Block AI bots" toggle in AI Crawl Control, a Bot Fight Mode rule, or a WAF custom rule on `cf.verified_bot_category` is catching the request, then narrow it: block the training category and add a skip rule for the retrieval agents you want citing you. Verified bots must not be handed Managed Challenge, since a challenge is a hard failure for a non-browser client. Re-test after every WAF or bot-management change, because these toggles are applied zone-wide.
for ua in "OAI-SearchBot/1.0" "ChatGPT-User/1.0" "Claude-User/1.0" \
"Claude-SearchBot/1.0" "PerplexityBot/1.0" "Mozilla/5.0"; do
code=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' -A "$ua" https://example.com/)
printf '%s\t%s\n' "$code" "$ua"
done6 pt
!
Training crawlers are disallowed for this path
Blocked by robots.txt: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Applebot-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent, FacebookBot, Bytespider, Amazonbot, Diffbot, omgili, omgilibot, AI2Bot, cohere-training-data-crawler, PanguBot, Timpibot, ImagesiftBot, Kangaroo Bot, SemrushBot-OCOB, Scrapy.
Why it matters. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and CCBot collect pages into pretraining corpora, and Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are opt-out tokens that govern whether already-crawled pages may be used for Gemini and Apple Intelligence. Disallowing them removes your text from the corpora models generalise from, which is a policy choice, not a bug.
Fix. Decide this deliberately rather than by inheriting a template. If you want your content in model weights, remove the `Disallow: /` groups for `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `CCBot`, `Google-Extended`, and `Applebot-Extended`. If you do not, keep those groups but scope them to the paths that matter and leave retrieval fetchers untouched, because `Google-Extended` and `Applebot-Extended` only control training use and never affect search or answer citation. Record the decision somewhere durable so the next robots.txt edit does not silently reverse it.
Fix. Decide this deliberately rather than by inheriting a template. If you want your content in model weights, remove the `Disallow: /` groups for `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `CCBot`, `Google-Extended`, and `Applebot-Extended`. If you do not, keep those groups but scope them to the paths that matter and leave retrieval fetchers untouched, because `Google-Extended` and `Applebot-Extended` only control training use and never affect search or answer citation. Record the decision somewhere durable so the next robots.txt edit does not silently reverse it.
# Opt out of model training only.
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /8 pt
✓
No blanket disallow applies to this path
The wildcard group does not disallow the entire site.
5 pt
✓
robots.txt served as plain text with a 200 response
robots.txt served, 5314 bytes, 3 group(s).
3 pt
✓
No Crawl-delay directive constrains fetchers
No Crawl-delay directive.
2 pt
✓
Page is indexable, with no noindex directive
No noindex directive on the homepage.
2 pt
✓
Full-length snippet extraction is permitted
Snippets are not restricted by meta tags.
1 pt
✓
X-Robots-Tag header is absent or permissive
No restrictive X-Robots-Tag header.
1 pt
Readability 18 / 25
✗
Heading levels are missing, duplicated, or skipped
0 H1 and 15 headings total.
Why it matters. Chunkers split long pages on heading boundaries and carry the nearest heading into each chunk's metadata. A page with no `h1`, several competing `h1`s, or levels that skip from `h2` to `h4` produces chunks whose topic labels do not match their text, so retrieval matches the wrong passage.
Fix. Give every page one `h1` that names its subject, then nest `h2` and `h3` without skipping levels. Make each heading describe the section beneath it in words a reader would search for, rather than a label like "Overview". Style with CSS instead of choosing heading levels for their font size, and never use a heading tag for a caption or a button.
Fix. Give every page one `h1` that names its subject, then nest `h2` and `h3` without skipping levels. Make each heading describe the section beneath it in words a reader would search for, rather than a label like "Overview". Style with CSS instead of choosing heading levels for their font size, and never use a heading tag for a caption or a button.
<h1>Robots.txt rules for AI crawlers</h1>
<h2>Training crawlers</h2>
<h3>GPTBot</h3>
<h3>ClaudeBot</h3>
<h2>Retrieval and citation fetchers</h2>
<h3>OAI-SearchBot</h3>3 pt
!
Visible text is a small fraction of the HTML payload
Text is 3.1% of the 327 KB document; 9 KB is inline script.
Why it matters. Extractors strip scripts, styles, and wrapper markup before passing text to a model, and a page where content is a small fraction of the payload loses more of it to boilerplate removal. Inline JSON state blobs and deeply nested wrappers also push real text past the truncation limit of a retrieval context.
Fix. Move inline hydration state and large inline scripts out of the document, or fetch them after load instead of embedding them. Flatten wrapper `div` trees and let semantic elements carry the content, and keep utility-class soup out of the article body. Serve the same text without the boilerplate at a stable URL if you need a clean extraction target.
Fix. Move inline hydration state and large inline scripts out of the document, or fetch them after load instead of embedding them. Flatten wrapper `div` trees and let semantic elements carry the content, and keep utility-class soup out of the article body. Serve the same text without the boilerplate at a stable URL if you need a clean extraction target.
4 pt
!
Title is missing, duplicated, or too generic to identify the page
Title is 8 characters: "Mashable"
Why it matters. The `<title>` is the first text an indexer stores for the URL and is frequently reused verbatim as the link label in a generated answer. An empty, duplicated, or purely brand-name title gives the ranker no lexical signal for the page's actual topic.
Fix. Write a unique `<title>` of roughly 30 to 60 characters that leads with the page's subject and ends with the brand. Match the wording of the `h1` so the stored label and the visible heading agree. Remove template output such as "Home" or a bare site name, and keep keyword lists and separator chains out of it.
Fix. Write a unique `<title>` of roughly 30 to 60 characters that leads with the page's subject and ends with the brand. Match the wording of the `h1` so the stored label and the visible heading agree. Remove template output such as "Home" or a bare site name, and keep keyword lists and separator chains out of it.
<title>Allow AI answer engines in robots.txt | Example</title>3 pt
✓
Substantive text is present in the server-rendered HTML
1678 words of text are present in the raw HTML. Most AI fetchers do not run JavaScript.
9 pt
✓
Primary content is wrapped in a semantic landmark
A <main> landmark marks the primary content.
3 pt
✓
Meta description provides an author-written summary
Meta description is 69 characters.
2 pt
✓
Document language is declared on the html element
Declared language: en.
1 pt
Structure 20 / 20
✓
Page ships JSON-LD structured data
251 JSON-LD node(s): WebSite, Organization, ImageObject, BreadcrumbList, ListItem, CollectionPage.
7 pt
✓
Structured data uses a specific type that matches the page
Recognized types: website, organization, breadcrumblist.
4 pt
✓
JSON-LD parses cleanly with recognised schema.org terms
All JSON-LD blocks parse cleanly.
3 pt
✓
Page declares a self-referential canonical URL
Canonical: https://mashable.com
3 pt
✓
XML sitemap is declared in robots.txt and returns 200
Sitemap found at https://mashable.com/sitemap-index.xml.
2 pt
✓
Key facts are available in lists or tables
0 tables, 5 lists, 0 code blocks, 0 question headings.
1 pt
Attribution 4 / 15
✗
No /llms.txt index of canonical pages
No /llms.txt.
Why it matters. `/llms.txt` is a markdown file that points an assistant at the canonical pages for a site, so retrieval does not depend on which page a search happened to return. Its format is fixed: one `#` title, a `>` blockquote summary, then `##` sections of markdown links with short notes.
Fix. Publish `/llms.txt` as `text/plain` markdown: an `#` H1 with the project name, a `>` blockquote summary, optional plain paragraphs of context, then `##` sections whose bullets are `[title](absolute-url): note`. Link the pages you want quoted, put lower-priority links under an `## Optional` section, and prefer URLs that also serve clean markdown. Keep it generated from the same source as your sitemap so it does not drift, and remember it is a hint for assistants, not an access control mechanism.
Fix. Publish `/llms.txt` as `text/plain` markdown: an `#` H1 with the project name, a `>` blockquote summary, optional plain paragraphs of context, then `##` sections whose bullets are `[title](absolute-url): note`. Link the pages you want quoted, put lower-priority links under an `## Optional` section, and prefer URLs that also serve clean markdown. Keep it generated from the same source as your sitemap so it does not drift, and remember it is a hint for assistants, not an access control mechanism.
# Example
> Example publishes reference documentation for the Widget API and guides for
> configuring crawler access.
Prefer the pages below over search results; each URL is canonical.
## Docs
- [Widget API reference](https://example.com/docs/api): endpoints, auth, limits.
- [Quickstart](https://example.com/docs/quickstart): first request in five minutes.
## Policies
- [Crawler policy](https://example.com/legal/crawlers): which agents we allow.
## Optional
- [Changelog](https://example.com/changelog): dated release notes.4 pt
✗
No machine-readable author is attached to the page
No author or Person entity, which weakens the authority signals answer engines use.
Why it matters. An `author` property in structured data is what lets an answer engine name a person or organisation as the source and link the byline to a stable profile. A byline that exists only as styled text is not reliably associated with the document during extraction.
Fix. Add an `author` property to the page's `Article`, `BlogPosting`, or `NewsArticle` node, typed as `Person` or `Organization`, with a `name` and a `url` pointing at a real profile page. Give each author a stable `@id` and reuse it across posts so the entity consolidates. Keep the visible byline identical to the structured value, and avoid generic names such as "Admin" or "Staff Writer" where a real author exists.
Fix. Add an `author` property to the page's `Article`, `BlogPosting`, or `NewsArticle` node, typed as `Person` or `Organization`, with a `name` and a `url` pointing at a real profile page. Give each author a stable `@id` and reuse it across posts so the entity consolidates. Keep the visible byline identical to the structured value, and avoid generic names such as "Admin" or "Staff Writer" where a real author exists.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "BlogPosting",
"headline": "Allow AI answer engines in robots.txt",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"@id": "https://example.com/authors/dana-reyes#person",
"name": "Dana Reyes",
"url": "https://example.com/authors/dana-reyes",
"jobTitle": "Infrastructure Engineer",
"sameAs": ["https://github.com/danareyes"]
}
}3 pt
✗
No machine-readable published or modified date
No publication or modification dates in structured data.
Why it matters. Answer engines prefer recent sources for questions about current state and use `dateModified` to decide whether a cached copy needs refetching. With no machine-readable date the page is treated as undated and loses to competitors that publish one.
Fix. Publish `datePublished` and `dateModified` in the page's structured data as ISO 8601 values with a timezone offset. Update `dateModified` only when the content actually changes, since bumping it on every deploy trains crawlers to ignore it. Mirror the value in a visible `<time datetime>` element so the rendered text and the metadata agree, and keep the sitemap `lastmod` consistent with it.
Fix. Publish `datePublished` and `dateModified` in the page's structured data as ISO 8601 values with a timezone offset. Update `dateModified` only when the content actually changes, since bumping it on every deploy trains crawlers to ignore it. Mirror the value in a visible `<time datetime>` element so the rendered text and the metadata agree, and keep the sitemap `lastmod` consistent with it.
<time datetime="2026-08-04T14:20:00-04:00">Updated August 4, 2026</time>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"headline": "Allow AI answer engines in robots.txt",
"datePublished": "2026-02-11T09:00:00-05:00",
"dateModified": "2026-08-04T14:20:00-04:00"
}
</script>3 pt
!
No machine-readable license or usage terms for the content
No licence declaration, so reuse terms are ambiguous.
Why it matters. A `license` property, or a linked terms page, states the reuse conditions in a place a crawler can read, rather than leaving them to be inferred. Where terms are unstated, some pipelines default to the more restrictive handling, which reduces how much of the text is quoted.
Fix. Add a `license` property to the page's structured data pointing at a specific license URL, such as a Creative Commons deed or your own terms page, and add `rel="license"` on the visible link. Use `usageInfo` for conditions that are not a standard license, such as attribution wording or an API-only clause. State the terms once, at a stable URL, and reference it from every page rather than restating it per template.
Fix. Add a `license` property to the page's structured data pointing at a specific license URL, such as a Creative Commons deed or your own terms page, and add `rel="license"` on the visible link. Use `usageInfo` for conditions that are not a standard license, such as attribution wording or an API-only clause. State the terms once, at a stable URL, and reference it from every page rather than restating it per template.
<a rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"headline": "Allow AI answer engines in robots.txt",
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"usageInfo": "https://example.com/legal/content-reuse",
"creditText": "Example, crawlcensus research desk"
}
</script>2 pt
✓
Organization entity declares the publisher and its identifiers
Organization entity with sameAs links is present.
3 pt
Evidence raw measurements
robots.txt
- Size
- 5,314 bytes
- Groups
- 3
- Sitemaps
- https://mashable.com/sitemap-index.xml
https://mashable.com/sitemap-news-0.xml
https://mashable.com/sitemap-live-blogs-0.xml
View the file as our crawler received it
# Ziff Davis content is made available for your non-commercial use subject to our
# Terms of Use here: https://www.ziffdavis.com/terms-of-use
# Use of any robot, crawler, or other tool to scrape, harvest, extract, or retrieve any content on
# this website using automated means is prohibited without written permission from Ziff Davis.
# Prohibited uses include but are not limited to:
# (1) text and data mining under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single
# Market;
# (2) development or operation of artificial intelligence or machine learning software or
# databases, including by training, fine-tuning, embedding, and retrieval-augmented generation;
# (3) creating data sets containing our content or sharing it with others; and
# (4) any commercial purposes.
# Contact licensing@ziffdavis.com for assistance.
# Bot Disallows
# Block AI and other unwanted bots
User-agent: AddSearchBot
User-agent: AI2Bot
User-agent: Ai2Bot-DeepResearchEval
User-agent: Ai2Bot-Dolma
User-agent: AIWebIndex
User-agent: amazon-QBusiness
User-agent: AmazonBuyForMe
User-agent: Amazonbot
User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
User-agent: Amzn-User
User-agent: Anchor Browser
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: ApifyBot
User-agent: ApifyWebsiteContentCrawler
User-agent: Applebot
User-agent: Applebot-extended
User-agent: atlassian-bot
User-agent: AutoRAG
User-agent: AwarioSmartBot
User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
User-agent: Big Sur AI
User-agent: bigsur.ai
User-agent: Brandwatch
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# END Ziff Managed/Shared content
# Ziff Davis content is made available for your non-commercial use subject to our
# Terms of Use here: https://www.ziffdavis.com/terms-of-use
# Use of any robot, crawler, or other tool to scrape, harvest, extract, or retrieve any content on
# this website using automated means is prohibited without written permission from Ziff Davis.
# Prohibited uses include but are not limited to:
# (1) text and data mining under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single
# Market;
# (2) development or operation of artificial intelligence or machine learning software or
# databases, including by training, fine-tuning, embedding, and retrieval-augmented generation;
# (3) creating data sets containing our content or sharing it with others; and
# (4) any commercial purposes.
# Contact licensing@ziffdavis.com for assistance.
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Sitemap: https://mashable.com/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: https://mashable.com/sitemap-news-0.xml
Sitemap: https://mashable.com/sitemap-live-blogs-0.xml
Machine-readable extras
- llms.txt
- absent
- ai.txt
- absent
- Sitemap
- https://mashable.com/sitemap-index.xml
- Feeds
- https://mashable.com/feeds/rss/all
- Schema types
- WebSite, Organization, ImageObject, BreadcrumbList, ListItem, CollectionPage, ItemList
- Edge
- Cloudflare
- Final URL
- https://mashable.com/
- HTML size
- 327 KB, 1,678 words of text
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