Publishers / medium.com · also in Top 100
43
Invisible to machines
1 of 14 AI agents get the full page at https://medium.com/. Checked 2026-09-25 09:33 UTC.
medium.com scores 43 out of 100 for machine visibility, number 68 of the 100 content publishers checked on 2026-09-25. 1 of 14 AI agents receive the full page: 1 of 8 training crawlers, 0 of 3 AI search indexes and 0 of 3 assistant fetchers. 6 are refused in robots.txt and 7 are refused at the HTTP level. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Meta-ExternalAgent, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CCBot received a bot-management challenge instead of the page. There is no llms.txt.
youfull pagedegradedblockedunknown
Human
- Status
- 200
- Title
- Medium
- H1
- none
- Words
- 51
- Scripts
- 16 tags · 17 KB
- Meta robots
- index,follow
- Canonical
- https://medium.com
- Server
- cloudflare
Machine
- robots.txt
- 2 groups · 1 sitemaps
- llms.txt
- missing
- llms-full.txt
- missing
- X-Robots-Tag
- none
- Blocked
- GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Applebot-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CCBot
- Degraded
- none
- Challenged
- GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Meta-ExternalAgent, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CCBot
Gaps
- high13 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.
- mediumBot-management challenge served to crawlersGPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Meta-ExternalAgent, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CCBot received an interstitial instead of the page. A robots.txt rule is an honest block. A challenge hides the page without saying so.
- lowVery little text in the raw HTML51 words. Thin for both humans and machines.
- lowNo llms.txtOptional, but a short curated index at /llms.txt is the cheapest way to tell assistants what matters on this site.
- infoGoogle-Extended not listedYou block other training crawlers but Gemini training via Google-Extended is still allowed. Add it to the same group if the policy is meant to be even-handed.
Every agent
| Agent | Type | robots.txt | Fetch | Words | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human (Chrome)You | Human | allowed | 20076 ms | 51 | visible HTTP 200, 51 words |
| GooglebotGoogle · Classic search index. Also feeds AI Overviews. | Search engine | allowed | 200843 ms | 51 | visible HTTP 200, 51 words |
| Google-ExtendedGoogle · Robots-only token controlling Gemini training use. Never fetches on its own. | AI training | allowed | n/a | visible Robots-only token; allowed by robots.txt | |
| GPTBotOpenAI · Training crawler for OpenAI models. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 403 challenge67 ms | 127 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: GPTBot) |
| OAI-SearchBotOpenAI · Indexes for ChatGPT search results and citations. | AI search index | allowed | 403 challenge67 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
| ChatGPT-UserOpenAI · Live fetch when a user asks ChatGPT about a page. | AI assistant (live fetch) | allowed | 403 challenge67 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
| ClaudeBotAnthropic · Training crawler for Claude models. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 403 challenge67 ms | 127 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: ClaudeBot) |
| Claude-SearchBotAnthropic · Indexes for Claude web search. | AI search index | allowed | 403 challenge66 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
| Claude-UserAnthropic · Live fetch when a user asks Claude about a page. | AI assistant (live fetch) | allowed | 403 challenge66 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
| PerplexityBotPerplexity | AI search index | allowed | 403 challenge66 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
| Perplexity-UserPerplexity | AI assistant (live fetch) | allowed | 403 challenge66 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
| BingbotMicrosoft · Bing index. Also feeds Copilot and ChatGPT search. | Search engine | allowed | 200653 ms | 51 | visible HTTP 200, 51 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: / | 403 challenge68 ms | 127 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Meta-ExternalAgent) |
| AmazonbotAmazon · Alexa and Amazon AI. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 403 challenge68 ms | 127 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Amazonbot) |
| BytespiderByteDance · Known for ignoring robots.txt. | AI training | disallowedDisallow: / | 403 challenge67 ms | 127 | blocked robots.txt Disallow: / (group: Bytespider) |
| CCBotCommon Crawl · Open dataset used to train most LLMs. | AI training | allowed | 403 challenge66 ms | 127 | blocked Bot challenge served (HTTP 403) |
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 medium.com does right now, from Cloudflare's network.