---
title: '5.9% of Websites Are Accidentally Blocking ChatGPT — Here''s How to Check'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=_f8cZib2Sc8'
video_id: '_f8cZib2Sc8'
date: 2026-07-17
---

# 5.9% of Websites Are Accidentally Blocking ChatGPT — Here's How to Check

> Source: [5.9% of Websites Are Accidentally Blocking ChatGPT — Here's How to Check](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_f8cZib2Sc8)

## Summary

This video reveals that approximately 5.9% of websites are unintentionally blocking AI search bots like ChatGPT and Claude. Many sites inherit restrictive robots.txt rules from templates or platforms like Cloudflare, making them invisible to AI-powered search. The video provides a quick tip to check and fix this issue.

### Key Points

- **Accidental Blocking of AI Bots** [00:00] — About 5.9% of websites are inadvertently blocking ChatGPT and other AI search bots due to inherited robots.txt rules from templates or platforms like Cloudflare.
- **How to Check Your Site** [00:00] — Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for GPTbot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, or OAI-SearchBot. If any have a 'disallow' directive, your site is blocking that AI platform.
- **Consequences of Blocking** [00:00] — Blocking AI bots means those platforms likely won't read or recommend your content, reducing your visibility in AI search results.

### Conclusion

Checking your robots.txt file is a simple but crucial step to ensure your website is accessible to AI search engines, preventing accidental loss of referral traffic.

## Transcript

About 5.9% of websites are accidentally blocking ChatGPT from crawling them. That's millions of sites invisible to AI search, and it's probably not on purpose. A lot of sites inherit robots.txt rules [music] from templates. Like, if you're on Cloudflare, they have a feature that's now on by default that tells AI bots to stay away from your content. So, here's a quick tip to check if you're blocking ChatGPT and other AI search bots. Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for GPT bot, Claude bot, Google extended, or OAI search bot. If you see disallow next to any of those, you're asking that AI platform not to read your site, which means it probably won't recommend that page.