Does congress.gov block AI crawlers?

Blocks AI training and AI answers

congress.gov blocks both AI training crawlers and AI answer crawlers in its robots.txt.

Checked Oct 2, 2026 from congress.gov/robots.txt. Robots rules change; the live file is the source of truth.

AI crawlers blocked: 11 of 12
AI bots named in robots.txt: 12
llms.txt: Not found
Popularity: Tranco top 5,000 (#2,403)

Can AI assistants cite congress.gov?

ChatGPT search: its search crawler is blocked
Claude: its search crawler is blocked
Perplexity: its search crawler is blocked

congress.gov opts out of AI training by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Common Crawl, ByteDance, Meta. Training crawlers and answer crawlers are separate: blocking training doesn't by itself remove a site from AI answers.

AI crawler access, bot by bot

Crawler	Used for	Status on congress.gov
GPTBotOpenAI	AI training	Blocked
OAI-SearchBotOpenAI	AI answers	Blocked
ChatGPT-UserOpenAI	AI answers	Blocked
ClaudeBotAnthropic	AI training	Blocked
Claude-SearchBotAnthropic	AI answers	Blocked
Claude-UserAnthropic	AI answers	Blocked
PerplexityBotPerplexity	AI answers	Blocked
Google-ExtendedGoogle	AI training	Blocked
Applebot-ExtendedApple	AI training	Some paths restricted
CCBotCommon Crawl	AI training	Blocked
BytespiderByteDance	AI training	Blocked
Meta-ExternalAgentMeta	AI training	Blocked

How congress.gov compares

19% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block GPTBot; congress.gov is one of them.
18% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block ClaudeBot; congress.gov is one of them.
14% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block PerplexityBot; congress.gov is one of them.
Among 202 sites of similar popularity, 20% block at least one AI crawler.

The robots.txt rules that apply to AI crawlers

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /quick-search
Disallow: /advanced-search
Disallow: /*?q=*
Disallow: /*&q=*
Disallow: /*?r=*
Disallow: /*&r=*
Disallow: /*?s=*
Disallow: /*&s=*
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /lac

User-agent: AddSearchBot
User-agent: AI2Bot
User-agent: AI2Bot-DeepResearchEval
User-agent: Ai2Bot-Dolma
User-agent: aiHitBot
User-agent: amazon-kendra
User-agent: Amazonbot
User-agent: AmazonBuyForMe
User-agent: Andibot
User-agent: Anomura
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: atlassian-bot
User-agent: Awario
User-agent: bedrockbot
User-agent: bigsur.ai
User-agent: Bravebot
User-agent: Brightbot 1.0
User-agent: BuddyBot
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: Channel3Bot
User-agent: ChatGLM-Spider
User-agent: ChatGPT Agent
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-User
User-agent: Claude-Web
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: Cloudflare-AutoRAG
User-agent: CloudVertexBot
User-agent: cohere-ai
User-agent: cohere-training-data-crawler
User-agent: Cotoyogi
User-agent: Crawl4AI
User-agent: Crawlspace
User-agent: Datenbank Crawler
User-agent: DeepSeekBot
User-agent: Devin
User-agent: Diffbot
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
User-agent: Echobot Bot
User-agent: EchoboxBot
User-agent: FacebookBot
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
User-agent: Factset_spyderbot
User-agent: FirecrawlAgent
User-agent: FriendlyCrawler
User-agent: Gemini-Deep-Research
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: Google-Firebase
User-agent: Google-NotebookLM
User-agent: GoogleAgent-Mariner
User-agent: GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
User-agent: IbouBot
User-agent: ICC-Crawler
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
User-agent: imageSpider
User-agent: img2dataset
User-agent: ISSCyberRiskCrawler
User-agent: Kangaroo Bot
User-agent: KlaviyoAIBot
User-agent: KunatoCrawler
User-agent: laion-huggingface-processor
User-agent: LAIONDownloader
User-agent: LCC
User-agent: LinerBot
User-agent: Linguee Bot
User-agent: LinkupBot
User-agent: Manus-User
User-agent: meta-externalagent
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher
User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher
User-agent: meta-webindexer
User-agent: MistralAI-User
User-agent: MistralAI-User/1.0
User-agent: MyCentralAIScraperBot
User-agent: netEstate Imprint Crawler
User-agent: NotebookLM
User-agent: NovaAct
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: omgili
User-agent: omgilibot
User-agent: OpenAI
User-agent: Operator
User-agent: PanguBot
User-agent: Panscient
User-agent: panscient.com
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: PetalBot
User-agent: PhindBot
User-agent: Poggio-Citations
User-agent: Poseidon Research Crawler
User-agent: QualifiedBot
User-agent: QuillBot
User-agent: quillbot.com
User-agent: SBIntuitionsBot
User-agent: Scrapy
User-agent: SemrushBot-OCOB
User-agent: SemrushBot-SWA
User-agent: ShapBot
User-agent: Sidetrade indexer bot
User-agent: Spider
User-agent: TavilyBot
User-agent: TerraCotta
User-agent: Thinkbot
User-agent: TikTokSpider
User-agent: Timpibot
User-agent: TwinAgent
User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
User-agent: WARDBot
User-agent: Webzio-Extended
User-agent: webzio-extended
User-agent: wpbot
User-agent: WRTNBot
User-agent: YaK
User-agent: YandexAdditional
User-agent: YandexAdditionalBot
User-agent: YouBot
User-agent: ZanistaBot
Disallow: /

Excerpt: only groups for all user-agents (*) or named AI crawlers, up to 40 rules per group.

Sites with a similar AI policy

All sites that are “blocks ai training and ai answers” →

Does congress.gov block GPTBot?

Yes. As of Oct 2, 2026, congress.gov's robots.txt disallows GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler.

Can ChatGPT search show results from congress.gov?

Its robots.txt blocks a ChatGPT search crawler, so ChatGPT search is unlikely to read or cite those pages.

Does congress.gov have an llms.txt file?

We didn't find a valid llms.txt at congress.gov/llms.txt when we checked.

Data: congress.gov's public robots.txt and llms.txt, fetched by AskableHQ. Popularity rank from the Tranco list (ID Y83YG). Methodology.