Does oreilly.com block AI crawlers?

Can AI assistants cite oreilly.com?

• 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

oreilly.com opts out of AI training by OpenAI, 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 oreilly.com compares

• 19% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block GPTBot; oreilly.com is one of them.
• 18% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block ClaudeBot; oreilly.com does not.
• 14% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block PerplexityBot; oreilly.com does not.
• Among 158 sites of similar popularity, 25% block at least one AI crawler.

The robots.txt rules that apply to AI crawlers

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /graphics/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /promos/
Disallow: /ddp/
Disallow: /dpp/
Disallow: /programming/free/files/
Disallow: /design/free/files/
Disallow: /iot/free/files/
Disallow: /data/free/files/
Disallow: /webops-perf/free/files/
Disallow: /web-platform/free/files/
Disallow: /cs/
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /*/?ar
Disallow: /*/?orpq
Disallow: /*/?discount=learn
Disallow: /self-registration/*
Disallow: /member/login/*?next=

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User/2.0
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
User-agent: Applebot
User-agent: bingbot
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /member/login/*?next=

User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: claude-web
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: YouBot
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
User-agent: MistralAI-User
User-agent: meta-webindexer
User-agent: GoogleAgent-Mariner
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: DotBot
User-agent: archive.org_bot
User-agent: Pinterestbot
User-agent: TelegramBot
User-agent: kakaotalk-scrap
User-agent: getstream.io/opengraph-bot
User-agent: RamblerMail
User-agent: Brave
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /member/login/*?next=

User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: cohere-ai
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: AI2Bot
User-agent: Amazonbot
User-agent: Amazonbot-Video
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: meta-externalagent
User-agent: Diffbot
User-agent: omgili
User-agent: TimpiBot
User-agent: SeznamBot
User-agent: Exabot
User-agent: YandexBot
User-agent: Sogou
User-agent: 360Spider
User-agent: YisouSpider
User-agent: Baiduspider-Render/2.0
User-agent: MJ12bot
User-agent: DataForSeoBot
User-agent: AliyunSecBot
User-agent: ArchiveTeam
User-agent: ArchiveTeam ArchiveBot
User-agent: AwarioBot
User-agent: ZoominfoBot
User-agent: ali-implementer
User-agent: Blueno
User-agent: BIGO-baiguoyuan
User-agent: WorksOgCrawler
User-agent: OnPageBot
User-agent: DoCoMo
User-agent: SAMSUNG-SGH-E250
User-agent: TA-Googlebot
Disallow: /

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

Sites with a similar AI policy

• euronews.com · 3 blocked
• pnas.org · 1 blocked
• diretta.it · 3 blocked
• strava.com · 4 blocked
• meetup.com · 1 blocked
• merkur.de · 7 blocked
• 1c.ru · 1 blocked
• ixl.com · 3 blocked

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