Publishers / arstechnica.com
Two different webs
3 of 14 AI agents get the full page at https://arstechnica.com/. Checked 2026-09-25 09:33 UTC.
arstechnica.com scores 60 out of 100 for machine visibility, number 35 of the 100 content publishers checked on 2026-09-25. 3 of 14 AI agents receive the full page: 1 of 8 training crawlers, 1 of 3 AI search indexes and 1 of 3 assistant fetchers. All 11 refusals are written in robots.txt, which is the transparent way to do it. The pattern is "cite me, don't train on me": 7 of 8 training crawlers are refused while 2 of 6 search and assistant fetchers get through. There is no llms.txt.
youfull pagedegradedblockedunknown
Human
- Status
- 200
- Title
- Ars Technica - Serving the Technologist since 1998. News, reviews, and analysis.
- H1
- Ars Technica homepage
- Words
- 1,677
- Scripts
- 26 tags · 29 KB
- Meta robots
- max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1
- Canonical
- https://arstechnica.com/
- Server
- hidden
Machine
- robots.txt
- 5 groups · 1 sitemaps
- llms.txt
- missing
- llms-full.txt
- missing
- X-Robots-Tag
- none
- Blocked
- Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Applebot-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CCBot
- Degraded
- none
- Challenged
- none
Gaps
- high11 of 14 AI agents are blockedAssistants asked about this page will guess, or cite someone else. Deliberate for a paywalled publisher. Otherwise this is the biggest gap on the list.
- lowNo llms.txtOptional, but a short curated index at /llms.txt is the cheapest way to tell assistants what matters on this site.
Every agent
| Agent | Type | robots.txt | Fetch | Words | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human (Chrome)You | Human | allowed | 2001957 ms | 1,677 | visible HTTP 200, 1677 words |
| GooglebotGoogle · Classic search index. Also feeds AI Overviews. | Search engine | allowedAllow: /* | 2002689 ms | 1,677 | visible HTTP 200, 1677 words |
| Google-ExtendedGoogle · Robots-only token controlling Gemini training use. Never fetches on its own. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | n/a | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Google-Extended) | |
| GPTBotOpenAI · Training crawler for OpenAI models. | AI training | allowed | 2002031 ms | 1,677 | visible HTTP 200, 1677 words |
| OAI-SearchBotOpenAI · Indexes for ChatGPT search results and citations. | AI search index | allowed | 2001939 ms | 1,677 | visible HTTP 200, 1677 words |
| ChatGPT-UserOpenAI · Live fetch when a user asks ChatGPT about a page. | AI assistant (live fetch) | allowed | 2001934 ms | 1,677 | visible HTTP 200, 1677 words |
| ClaudeBotAnthropic · Training crawler for Claude models. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002025 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: ClaudeBot) |
| Claude-SearchBotAnthropic · Indexes for Claude web search. | AI search index | disallowedDisallow: / | 2001942 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Claude-SearchBot) |
| Claude-UserAnthropic · Live fetch when a user asks Claude about a page. | AI assistant (live fetch) | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002342 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Claude-User) |
| PerplexityBotPerplexity | AI search index | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002007 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: PerplexityBot) |
| Perplexity-UserPerplexity | AI assistant (live fetch) | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002304 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Perplexity-User) |
| BingbotMicrosoft · Bing index. Also feeds Copilot and ChatGPT search. | Search engine | allowed | 2002637 ms | 1,677 | visible HTTP 200, 1677 words |
| Applebot-ExtendedApple · Robots-only token for Apple Intelligence training. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | n/a | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Applebot-Extended) | |
| Meta-ExternalAgentMeta | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002034 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Meta-ExternalAgent) |
| AmazonbotAmazon · Alexa and Amazon AI. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002245 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Amazonbot) |
| BytespiderByteDance · Known for ignoring robots.txt. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002354 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Bytespider) |
| CCBotCommon Crawl · Open dataset used to train most LLMs. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 2002272 ms | 1,677 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: CCBot) |
Snapshot
Measured 2026-09-25 09:33 UTC from a residential connection. Sites change their rules often, and sites that verify crawler IPs answer differently to different networks. Run a live comparison to see what arstechnica.com does right now, from Cloudflare's network.