Technical checklist to avoid blocking search engines and ai crawlers

Robots.txt, cloudflare, WAF rules, sitemaps, canonicals and HTTP status codes: the points to review so Google and AI platforms can understand a website.

A website can have strong content and still be hard to interpret if crawlers cannot access its important public pages. This affects Google and also AI systems that rely on web retrieval.

Public pages should be crawlable, return 200 and appear in the sitemap. Errors such as 403, 404, 410, 429 or 5xx must be checked with several user agents, not only in a browser.

Security rules are necessary, but they should distinguish malicious traffic from legitimate crawlers such as gptbot, OAI-SearchBot, perplexitybot, claudebot, googlebot or Applebot.

The sitemap should include discoverable pages, canonical tags should point to the real main URL, and hreflang should connect equivalent language versions.