For years, bot management in SEO was relatively straightforward. You either allowed crawlers to access your website or blocked them. That model was never perfect, but it was generally sufficient for what we needed.
AI search has made that approach increasingly inadequate.
Today, websites are accessed by traditional search crawlers, AI training crawlers, retrieval bots, user-initiated fetches, and autonomous agents. These serve very different purposes, yet we regularly lump them together under the term “AI bots.”
Blocking a crawler used for model training has different consequences from blocking one retrieving content for search answers – this distinction really matters!
Robots.txt remains useful, but as it’s voluntary actual enforcement happens through CDNs, web application firewalls and bot mitigation services, which can contradict your robots.txt rules without the SEO team even knowing.
Agents complicate matters further. They can browse websites like real users, trigger analytics tracking, and become increasingly difficult to distinguish from human visitors. Block an agent performing a product comparison, and you might not simply lose a ranking. You could disappear from the answer entirely.
My argument is that we need to move from block lists to deliberate bot policies. Policies that consider who’s accessing our content, why they’re doing it and the consequences of allowing or blocking them.
These decisions increasingly involve SEO, engineering, security, legal, and commercial teams. They need to be coordinated, consistently enforced and regularly reviewed.
I’ve covered these challenges, their implications, and some practical approaches in my GEO Elite presentation. Hope you find it useful:
- Complete Crawler List For AI User-Agents [Dec 2025]
- AI Bots Keep Overloading Servers. Should Website Owners Keep Paying?
- Web Almanac Data Reveals CMS Plugins Are Setting Technical SEO Standards (Not SEOs)
This post was originally published on AI Search Marketing with Chris Green.
Featured Image: Andrey Suslov/
