--- title: "Bot Crawl Checker" description: "Check if your URL is accessible to 24 well-known search engine crawlers, AI bots, and social media bots. Analyze robots.txt rules, HTTP status, and response times." url: https://findutils.com/network/bot-crawl-checker/ category: network --- # Bot Crawl Checker Check if your URL is accessible to 24 well-known search engine crawlers, AI bots, and social media bots. Analyze robots.txt rules, HTTP status, and response times. **Use this tool:** [Bot Crawl Checker](https://findutils.com/network/bot-crawl-checker/) ## Programmatic access - REST id `bot-crawl-checker`: POST https://api.findutils.com/api/tools/bot-crawl-checker/execute (reference: https://findutils.com/api/bot-crawl-checker/) - MCP tool `bot_crawl_checker` on https://mcp.findutils.com (reference: https://findutils.com/mcp/bot-crawl-checker/) ## Why Check Bot & Crawler Accessibility?

Websites can accidentally block search engine crawlers, AI bots, and social media bots through misconfigured firewalls, robots.txt rules, or security settings. If Googlebot or BingBot can't access your pages, your content won't appear in search results. Blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot or ClaudeBot means your content won't be cited in AI-powered search experiences. Social media bots need access to generate link previews when your URLs are shared.

Common causes of accidental blocking include Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode, overly aggressive WAF rules, misconfigured robots.txt files, and meta robots tags set to noindex. These issues can go undetected for months, silently hurting your search rankings and traffic. This tool checks your URL against 24 well-known bots to identify these issues.

## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is a bot crawl checker? A bot crawl checker tests whether well-known web crawlers (like Googlebot, BingBot, GPTBot) can access your website. It simulates requests using each bot's real User-Agent header and checks multiple blocking layers including robots.txt, HTTP status codes, meta tags, response headers, and firewall challenges. ### Why is my site blocked by Googlebot or BingBot? Common causes include: a restrictive robots.txt file with Disallow rules, Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode or aggressive WAF rules challenging crawler traffic, a meta robots tag set to 'noindex', X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers blocking indexing, or the server returning 403/429/503 errors to bot user agents. Our tool checks all of these layers. ### What's the difference between robots.txt and meta robots? robots.txt controls whether a bot can crawl (access) a URL. It's checked before the bot even downloads the page. Meta robots tags (in HTML) and X-Robots-Tag headers control whether a page is indexed after the bot accesses it. A page can be crawlable but not indexable, or vice versa. Both matter for search visibility. ### Should I block AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot? It depends on your goals. Allowing AI crawlers means your content can be used in AI-powered search experiences (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) which can drive traffic and citations. Blocking them prevents your content from being used for AI training. Many sites allow AI search bots (ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot) while blocking training bots (GPTBot, CCBot). ### What is Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode and how does it affect crawlers? Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode automatically challenges traffic that appears to come from bots. While it's designed to block malicious bots, it can also interfere with legitimate search engine crawlers, causing them to receive JavaScript challenges they can't solve. This results in your pages not being indexed. You can disable it or create WAF rules to allow verified bots. ### How many bots does this tool check? We check 24 bots across 4 categories: 12 search engine crawlers (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Apple, Seznam, Qwant, Naver, Mojeek, Kagi), 7 AI crawlers (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, cohere-ai), 2 SEO tool crawlers (Ahrefs, Semrush), and 3 social media bots (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). ### Why do social media bots need access to my site? When someone shares your URL on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, these platforms send their bots to fetch your page's Open Graph meta tags (title, description, image) to generate a link preview card. If your site blocks these bots, shared links will appear as plain text without rich previews, reducing click-through rates. ### What does HTTP 405 'Method Not Allowed' mean for bots? HTTP 405 means the server rejects the HTTP method (GET or HEAD) used by the bot. This often happens with Cloudflare Workers or custom server configurations that only handle GET requests and reject HEAD requests. Since many crawlers use HEAD requests to check URLs before crawling, this can prevent indexing. ### How does the email verification work? When you submit a URL and email, we send a verification link to your inbox. Clicking the link confirms your email is valid and starts the crawl check. Once all 24 bots are tested, we email you a detailed report with the results. This prevents abuse and ensures reports reach real recipients. ### Is this tool free? Yes, the Bot Crawl Checker is available. You can run up to 3 checks per email per day. The full report is sent to your email with detailed results for all 24 bots, including specific issues found and recommendations for fixing them. ## Related Tools - [Security Headers Analyzer](https://findutils.com/network/security-headers-analyzer/) - [DNS Security Scanner](https://findutils.com/network/dns-security-scanner/) - [SSL Certificate Checker](https://findutils.com/network/ssl-certificate-checker/) - [WHOIS Lookup](https://findutils.com/network/whois-lookup/)