How to Prepare Your Website for AI Crawlers
A practical checklist for publishing crawler preferences, reviewing server logs, and keeping AI bot policies maintainable.
Start with an inventory
List the parts of your site that should be discoverable, the areas that should stay private, and the content types that carry licensing or contractual constraints. Marketing pages, docs, forums, media libraries, and app routes often need different treatment.
A good policy starts with operational reality. If your team cannot maintain a rule, simplify it.
Separate bot use cases
Avoid one blanket answer for every crawler. Search indexing, answer retrieval, AI training, commercial scraping, and archiving have different business implications. Category-level choices make policy management easier.
Publish and monitor
Keep robots.txt current, add AI-oriented policy links, and review user-agent activity over time. If a policy changes, record the date, owner, and rationale so future audits are easier.