Agent Ready Crawlers

The field guide to every AI crawler and agent at the door, and the vendors who decide who gets in.

Glossary

robots.txt

In short

A plain-text file at the root of a host that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, grouped by user-agent token. Standardised as RFC 9309; it states a preference and enforces nothing. The crawl parsed a robots.txt from 79.2 percent of the 10,886 domains that answered, and 67.4 percent of top-10,000 files carry a Sitemap line.

Definition

A plain-text file at the root of a host that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, grouped by user-agent token. Standardised as RFC 9309; it states a preference and enforces nothing.

Sourced example

Anthropic documents "User-agent: ClaudeBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to block ClaudeBot site-wide, per subdomain. Source, read 2026-11-04.

How it shows up here

The crawl parsed a robots.txt from 79.2 percent of the 10,886 domains that answered, and 67.4 percent of top-10,000 files carry a Sitemap line.

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Sources

Last reviewed 2026-11-04