UAWatch Blog

AI Bot Access, robots.txt & GEO — Practical Guides for SEO Professionals

Most SEO professionals spend significant time optimising content, building links, and improving site structure but very few check whether AI crawlers can actually reach the pages they're working on. A single Cloudflare or Sucuri rule, a WAF update, or a robots.txt mistake can block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or Googlebot overnight, which can seriously affect your visibility and traffic.

This blog covers the practical side of bot access monitoring, such as what blocks AI crawlers, how to diagnose it, how to fix it, and why it matters more than ever as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) becomes a core part of SEO strategy. Everything here is based on real data from monitoring hundreds of sites with UAWatch.

Written by Kelly Sheppard, structured data consultant, founder of The Structured Data Company, and builder of UAWatch.

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