Should I block AI crawlers on my website?
AI & Answer Engines — answered straight, by an operator who builds these systems rather than an agency selling them.
For a local service business, no. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest removes you from the answers your buyers are now asking for. Publishers with paid archives have a real argument for blocking; a roofing company trying to be recommended does not.
The longer version
Check what you are already doing before assuming you are open. Plenty of contractor sites block AI crawlers by accident — a security plugin, a bot-protection service, or an aggressive firewall rule that was set up years ago and never reviewed. Pull up your robots.txt and read it.
The one legitimate concern is scraping of original photography and written content. That is worth protecting selectively, not by locking the whole domain. Block the specific paths you care about, leave your service and location pages open, and keep the door open to being cited.
More on ai & answer engines
Let's build something real.
Want this done for your business instead of explained? Email bannisterderik@gmail.com or call/text 530-736-7085 — you get a straight answer from me, not a sales sequence.
Tell me what you need.
Name and a phone number is enough. You get me — not a form that disappears into an agency inbox.
A 250+ page site for your business. $500 if you check out now.
Every service you offer and every town you serve gets its own page — built on your logo, your colors, your license number. Schema, sitemap, and llms.txt so search engines and AI assistants both read you correctly. Delivered in 7 business days. You own all of it, source code included.