Does myanimelist.net block AI crawlers?

Can AI assistants cite myanimelist.net?

• ChatGPT search: its search crawlers may read the site
• Claude: its search crawlers may read the site
• Perplexity: its search crawlers may read the site

myanimelist.net opts out of AI training by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Apple, 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

How myanimelist.net compares

• 19% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block GPTBot; myanimelist.net is one of them.
• 18% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block ClaudeBot; myanimelist.net is one of them.
• 14% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block PerplexityBot; myanimelist.net does not.
• Among 173 sites of similar popularity, 25% block at least one AI crawler.

The robots.txt rules that apply to AI crawlers

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /log/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /comtocom.php
Disallow: /comments.php
Disallow: /ad/
Disallow: /about
Disallow: /dbchanges.php
Disallow: /clubs.php/*
Disallow: /_Incapsula_Resource
Disallow: /mymessages.php
Disallow: /sns/*/*

User-agent: AI2Bot
User-agent: Ai2Bot-Dolma
User-agent: aiHitBot
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
User-agent: Brightbot 1.0
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: ChatGLM-Spider
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: Claude-Web
User-agent: cohere-training-data-crawler
User-agent: Cotoyogi
User-agent: DeepSeekBot
User-agent: Diffbot
User-agent: FacebookBot
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
User-agent: Factset_spyderbot
User-agent: FirecrawlAgent
User-agent: FriendlyCrawler
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ICC-Crawler
User-agent: img2dataset
User-agent: ISSCyberRiskCrawler
User-agent: Kangaroo Bot
User-agent: laion-huggingface-processor
User-agent: LAIONDownloader
User-agent: Linguee Bot
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
User-agent: meta-externalagent
User-agent: meta-webindexer
User-agent: omgili
User-agent: omgilibot
User-agent: PanguBot
User-agent: SBIntuitionsBot
User-agent: Scrapy
User-agent: Sidetrade indexer bot
User-agent: Spider
User-agent: TerraCotta
User-agent: TikTokSpider
User-agent: Timpibot
User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
User-agent: Webzio-Extended
User-agent: webzio-extended
User-agent: YandexAdditional
User-agent: YandexAdditionalBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

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

Sites with a similar AI policy

• nicovideo.jp · 1 blocked
• fool.com · 1 blocked
• crunchbase.com · 7 blocked
• unep.org · 7 blocked
• cbssports.com · 1 blocked
• tagesschau.de · 7 blocked
• tomshardware.com · 2 blocked
• n-able.com · 1 blocked

All sites that are “blocks ai training, allows ai answers” →