Does tomshardware.com block AI crawlers?

Can AI assistants cite tomshardware.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

tomshardware.com opts out of AI training by 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 tomshardware.com compares

• 19% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block GPTBot; tomshardware.com does not.
• 18% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block ClaudeBot; tomshardware.com does not.
• 14% of the 1,278 popular sites we checked block PerplexityBot; tomshardware.com does not.
• Among 179 sites of similar popularity, 24% block at least one AI crawler.

The robots.txt rules that apply to AI crawlers

User-agent: *
Disallow: */deals/compare
Disallow: */html/
Disallow: */p/*/embed/captioned
Disallow: */outlink*
Disallow: *.freyr.*
Disallow: */comments/*
Disallow: */.events-handler*
Disallow: *CoreWebVitalsThresholdEvent*
Disallow: */partials/*
Disallow: */future.adtech.freyr.v1.PageViewEvent
Disallow: *searchTerm=*
Disallow: *sortBy=*
Disallow: *productBrand=*
Disallow: *%7B*%7D*
Disallow: *seenMatchId=*
Disallow: /infinite-scroll-article/*
Disallow: /infinite-scroll-review/*
Disallow: /infinite-scroll-recipe/*

User-agent: bytespider
User-agent: mistralai
User-agent: cohere
User-agent: ai2bot
User-agent: youbot
User-agent: omgili
User-agent: diffbot
User-agent: kangaroo
User-agent: img2dataset
User-agent: amazonbot
User-agent: amazon-qbusiness
User-agent: meta-externalagent
User-agent: meta-webindexer
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /r/
Disallow: /?*
Disallow: /us/s/
Disallow: /de/*
Disallow: */primary-style
Disallow: /coupons/coupons/visit/*

User-agent: *

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

Sites with a similar AI policy

• unep.org · 7 blocked
• geeksforgeeks.org · 2 blocked
• zalando.de · 5 blocked
• fool.com · 1 blocked
• dictionary.com · 3 blocked
• razorpay.com · 1 blocked
• myanimelist.net · 7 blocked
• tagesspiegel.de · 6 blocked

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