Grade B 78/10078Grade B
AI access report

outsideonline.com

Blocks 1 of 24 answer engines, blocks 15 training crawlers, refuses AI user agents at the edge.

3 failing 4 partial 20 passing Scanned 4 hours ago · 2 scans on record
JSON Monitor this site
Reach
28.3 / 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
20.2 / 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
10 / 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 1 of 24 answer engines blocked

CrawlerOperatorUses content forrobots.txtLive 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 allowed
Allow: /
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 allowed
Allow: /
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 allowed
Allow: /
not probed
Claude-SearchBot
Indexes content to improve the relevance and accuracy of Claude's search results.
Anthropic Answer index allowed
Allow: /
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.
Google Model training allowed not probed
Googlebot
Crawls and renders pages for Google Search, Images, Video, News and Discover.
Google Answer index allowed
Allow: /
not probed
Googlebot-News
Robots token controlling Google News inclusion; crawling itself uses the Googlebot user agents.
Google Answer index allowed
Allow: /
not probed
Google-CloudVertexBot
Crawls sites at a site owner's request to build Vertex AI agents; no effect on Google Search.
Google Live retrieval allowed not probed
GoogleOther
Generic Google crawler used by product teams for one-off fetches such as internal research and development.
Google Model training allowed
Allow: /
not probed
Applebot
Crawls for Siri, Spotlight and Safari search; falls back to Googlebot rules and ignores Crawl-delay.
Apple Answer index allowed
Allow: /
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
Allow: /
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 allowed
Allow: /
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 allowed
Allow: /
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 allowed
Allow: /
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 allowed
Allow: /
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
Allow: /
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 allowed 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 allowed 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 allowed
Allow: /
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 allowed not probed
YouBot
Indexes pages for You.com search results and the AI answers built on that index.
You.com Answer index allowed not probed
PanguBot
Collects web content used to train Huawei's PanGu family of large models.
Huawei Model training allowed 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 allowed not probed
SemrushBot-OCOB
Crawls pages to feed Semrush's ContentShake AI writing tool.
Semrush Model training allowed 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 allowed 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 28.3 / 40

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.
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"
done
Reference
6 pt
!

Answer-engine fetchers are blocked, so you cannot be cited

Blocked from citing you: cohere-ai.

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.
# 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.xml
Reference
12 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, Timpibot, ImagesiftBot.

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.
# Opt out of model training only.
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /
Reference
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, 2482 bytes, 4 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 20.2 / 25

Heading levels are missing, duplicated, or skipped

0 H1 and 52 headings total, 3 phrased as questions.

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.
<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>
Reference
3 pt
!

Visible text is a small fraction of the HTML payload

Text is 4.5% of the 414 KB document; 202 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.
4 pt

Substantive text is present in the server-rendered HTML

2380 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

Title is unique and describes the page in specific terms

Title is 16 characters: "Outside Magazine"

3 pt

Meta description provides an author-written summary

Meta description is 139 characters.

2 pt

Document language is declared on the html element

Declared language: en-US.

1 pt

Structure 20 / 20

Page ships JSON-LD structured data

13 JSON-LD node(s): WebPage, ReadAction, ImageObject, BreadcrumbList, ListItem, WebSite.

7 pt

Structured data uses a specific type that matches the page

Recognized types: breadcrumblist, website, organization.

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://www.outsideonline.com/

3 pt

XML sitemap is declared in robots.txt and returns 200

Sitemap found at /sitemap.xml (2724 URLs on the first document).

2 pt

Key facts are available in lists or tables

0 tables, 8 lists, 0 code blocks, 3 question headings.

1 pt

Attribution 10 / 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.
# 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.
Reference
4 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.
<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>
Reference
2 pt

Author is declared in structured data

Authorship is declared in structured data or markup.

3 pt

Published and modified dates are declared in ISO 8601

dateModified is published.

3 pt

Organization entity declares the publisher and its identifiers

Organization entity with sameAs links is present.

3 pt

Evidence raw measurements

robots.txt
Size
2,482 bytes
Groups
4
Sitemaps
https://www.outsideonline.com/sitemap_index.xml
View the file as our crawler received it
# Outside Online content is for personal, non-commercial use.
# Scraping or data mining with automated tools is not allowed. 
# You cannot use this content to train AI models or create data sets.
# Contact Outside Online for permission to use data.

# (A) ALLOW: SOCIAL PREVIEWS & SEARCH AI (RAG / Citations)
# These bots can see content for user requests and link previews.
User-agent: Applebot
User-agent: BingBot
User-agent: BingPreview
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-User
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
User-agent: Grok-DeepSearch
User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: GoogleOther
User-agent: LinkedInBot
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher
User-agent: meta-webindexer
User-agent: MistralAI-User
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: Slackbot
User-agent: Twitterbot
User-agent: xAI-Grok
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /*.pantheonsite.io/
Disallow: /accounts.outsideonline.com/
Disallow: /preview/
Allow: /

# (B) BLOCK: AI TRAINING, DATA AGGREGATORS & BRAND SAFETY
# These bots crawl for LLM training or commercial scraping.
User-agent: AI2Bot
User-agent: AI2Bot-Dolma
User-agent: AliyunSecBot
User-agent: Amazonbot
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
User-agent: bigsur.ai
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: cohere-ai
User-agent: cohere-training-data-crawler
User-agent: DeepseekBot
User-agent: Diffbot
User-agent: FacebookBot
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: GrokBot
User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
User-agent: meta-externalagent
User-agent: omgili
User-agent: omgilibot
User-agent: peer39_crawler
User-agent: peer39_crawler/1.0
User-agent: Petalbot
User-agent: Timpibot
User-agent: webzio
User-agent: webzio-extended
Disallow: /

# (C) MEDIA CRAWLERS (Images & Video)
User-agent: Googlebot-Image 
User-agent: Googlebot-Video 
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /*.pantheonsite.io/
Disallow: /accounts.outsideonline.com/
Disallow: /preview/
Allow: /  

# (D) GENERAL SEARCH ENGINES & SEO TOOLS
User-agent: *
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /*.pantheonsite.io/
Disallow: /accounts.outsideonline.com/
Disallow: /preview/
Sitemap: https://www.outsideonline.com/sitemap_index.xml
Machine-readable extras
llms.txt
absent
ai.txt
absent
Sitemap
/sitemap.xml (2,724 URLs)
Feeds
none
Schema types
WebPage, ReadAction, ImageObject, BreadcrumbList, ListItem, WebSite, SearchAction, EntryPoint, PropertyValueSpecification, Organization
Edge
Cloudflare
Final URL
https://www.outsideonline.com/featured?scope=anon
HTML size
414 KB, 2,380 words of text

Publish the score free

Sites that score well embed the badge. It links back to this live report, which re-measures on every scan.

AI access score badge
<a href="https://crawlcensus.com/site/outsideonline.com"><img src="https://crawlcensus.com/badge/outsideonline.com.svg" alt="AI access score for outsideonline.com" width="150" height="20"></a>

Track changes on this domain pro

Crawler policy is edited quietly. We re-scan monitored domains daily, keep the history, and email you the moment a crawler is blocked or unblocked, an llms.txt appears, or the score moves.

One address, unlimited domains during the beta. No newsletter, only change alerts.