answer-crawler-check

Fails your CI job when robots.txt blocks an AI answer crawler from any page in your sitemap. OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and the rest each read their own User-agent group. One wrong line and that engine stops citing the page, and nothing else in the build notices.

Docs: https://synapsereality.io/open-source/answer-crawler-check/

npx answer-crawler-check https://example.com/sitemap-index.xml

What it checks

Every URL in the sitemap, against every chosen crawler, with the robots.txt of that URL's site. Sitemap indexes and gzipped sitemaps are followed.

$ answer-crawler-check dist/sitemap.xml --site-dir dist
https://example.com: robots.txt from dist/robots.txt, local file, 3 page(s)
ok      OAI-SearchBot  (no group of its own, uses *)
ok      ChatGPT-User  (no group of its own, uses *)
BLOCKED Claude-SearchBot  1 URL(s)
          https://example.com/docs/setup/  Disallow: /docs/ (line 9)
BLOCKED Claude-User  1 URL(s)
          https://example.com/docs/setup/  Disallow: /docs/ (line 9)
ok      PerplexityBot  (no group of its own, uses *)
...
answer-crawler-check: FAILED, 2 problem(s)
  Claude-SearchBot: blocked from 1 of 3 URL(s)
  Claude-User: blocked from 1 of 3 URL(s)

Each blocked URL comes with the rule that blocked it and its line number. The exit code is 0 when everything is allowed, 1 when something is blocked, and 2 for bad input.

Single-URL checkers look at / or one page you paste in. That misses a Disallow: /docs/ in a group you forgot about, and a wildcard rule such as /*.html that hits only some pages. This tool reads every page in the sitemap.

Which crawlers

--agents answer is the default. It holds the crawlers that fetch pages while an answer is written, or that build the index those answers cite:

crawler	what it feeds
OAI-SearchBot	ChatGPT search
ChatGPT-User	ChatGPT fetching a page for a user
Claude-SearchBot	Claude's search index
Claude-User	Claude fetching a page for a user
PerplexityBot	Perplexity's index
Perplexity-User	Perplexity fetching a page for a user
DuckAssistBot	DuckDuckGo's AI answers
MistralAI-User	Le Chat fetching a page for a user
Applebot	Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions
Googlebot	Google Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode
Bingbot	Bing, and Copilot answers

Training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot are left out on purpose. Blocking them is a reasonable choice and doesn't remove you from search answers. Add them by name if you want them checked: --agents answer,GPTBot.

--agents answer-extended adds every crawler that ai.robots.txt files under "AI Search Crawlers" or "AI Assistants", 43 names in the bundled copy. --agents all checks all 179. --list-agents prints what a setting expands to.

The crawler list

Crawler names and descriptions come from ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt, the community list of AI crawlers (MIT). A copy of its robots.json ships in data/, with the commit it came from in data/UPSTREAM.md. --list latest fetches the current upstream file instead, and --list path.json reads your own file in the same format.

That project keeps the list. If a crawler is missing, send the fix there.

How robots.txt is read

The rules follow RFC 9309, the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which is also what Google documents.

A crawler obeys the group that names it. Only when no group names it does it fall back to User-agent: *, and a named group never inherits the * rules. Inside a group the longest matching pattern wins and Allow wins a tie. * and $ work as wildcards and end anchors. Groups that name the same crawler twice are merged.

A robots.txt that answers 404 (or any 4xx apart from 429) means no rules, so everything is allowed. A 5xx, a 429 or no answer at all means "disallow everything" to a crawler. The tool then reports every page on that site as blocked.

--require-named also fails any crawler that has no group of its own. Use it if your policy is to allow answer crawlers by name.

Options

flag
--agents SPEC	answer (default), answer-extended, all, or names A,B,C
--robots FILE|URL	use this robots.txt for every site instead of fetching it
--site-dir DIR	read sitemaps and robots.txt from a local build when the file is there
--url URL	also check this page, repeatable
--require-named	fail crawlers that only fall through to *
--list FILE|URL|latest	crawler list in robots.json format
--max-urls N	stop after N page URLs (default 50000)
--json FILE	full report as JSON, - for stdout
--report-only	print the report, always exit 0

Before you deploy

With --site-dir, a sitemap URL such as https://example.com/sitemap-0.xml is read from dist/sitemap-0.xml when that file exists, and dist/robots.txt is used for every page. The build is checked before it goes live, with no network calls for your own files.

npm run build
answer-crawler-check dist/sitemap-index.xml --site-dir dist

GitHub Actions

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- run: npm ci && npm run build
- uses: synapsereality/answer-crawler-check@v0.1.1
  with:
    sitemap: dist/sitemap-index.xml
    site-dir: dist

Or against the live site, on a schedule:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 6 * * 1"
jobs:
  crawlers:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: synapsereality/answer-crawler-check@v0.1.1
        with:
          sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap-index.xml
          require-named: "true"

The action runs on the runner's own Node (20 or later) and installs nothing.

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/synapsereality/answer-crawler-check
cd answer-crawler-check
node bin/answer-crawler-check.js --help

No dependencies. Node 20 or later.

Tests

npm test

33 tests: the robots.txt rules above, sitemap indexes and gzip, the 4xx and 5xx cases, --site-dir, and the CLI exit codes. They use a local HTTP server.

What it doesn't check

robots.txt is only one door. A crawler can still be turned away by a firewall rule, a bot-protection challenge, a noindex tag or an X-Robots-Tag header. This tool reads robots.txt and nothing else.

Licence

MIT. The bundled crawler list is MIT too, copyright ai.robots.txt, see NOTICE.md. Made by Synapse.