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GPTBot vs ClaudeBot - what the difference actually means for your site

2026-04-22 · 3 min read

Both bots crawl your site. They do different things with what they find. Here's the practical difference between blocking one, blocking both, or allowing all.

GPTBot and ClaudeBot are the two most-talked-about AI crawlers right now. They sound similar - both are operated by major AI companies, both identify themselves clearly in User-Agent strings, both respect robots.txt. But they're used differently, and the decision to allow or block each one has different consequences.

What GPTBot does

GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler. Its captures feed into future model training. ChatGPT also separately uses a live retrieval system (via Bing API and a separate user-agent ChatGPT-User) to fetch current information when answering certain queries. Blocking GPTBot specifically affects training inclusion, not live retrieval.

What ClaudeBot does

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler. Like GPTBot, it feeds future model training. Anthropic also operate retrieval through their API but it's currently more opt-in. Allowing ClaudeBot means future versions of Claude are more likely to know about your content.

The practical decision tree

Allow both if: you publish content you want quoted, your business benefits from AI awareness, and you don't mind models being trained on your content. This is most small-to-medium businesses.

Block both if: you publish content that's specifically commercially valuable (paywalled news, premium research), you're contractually obligated not to feed AI training, or you're testing the impact of inclusion vs exclusion.

Allow one, block the other if: you have a specific commercial reason to favour one AI company. This is rare.

The honest take

For 95% of sites, the right answer is "allow both, and check quarterly that the rules are still in place." The benefits of being known to AI models materially outweigh the perceived loss of content control. The remaining 5% have specific commercial reasons to feel otherwise, and they know who they are.