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Rule · AI search

AI crawler user agents get 401/403/429/503 or a challenge page

geo/ai-bot-blockederrorvoid geoupdated

Why it matters

A WAF or bot-management rule that blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot removes the site from AI answers regardless of robots.txt. Challenge responses to spoofed UAs can be inconclusive, because verified crawlers are identified by IP.

How to fix it

Allow verified AI search crawlers in the CDN/WAF (Cloudflare AI Crawl Control, Vercel Firewall bot rules). Confirm in server logs that real crawler IPs get 200.

References

void geo reports 41 rules in this category. Generative-engine optimisation: whether AI crawlers that don't run JavaScript see the same content, valid and visible JSON-LD, an explicit AI robots policy, llms.txt, Markdown mirrors and answer-first writing.