See exactly which AI crawlers your robots.txt blocks — training, search, and on-demand fetch, reported separately, not one site-wide verdict.
Your robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain that tells crawlers where they may go. If it tells the AI crawlers to stay out, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers never read your pages, and you don't show up in their answers.
Most checkers give you one verdict for "AI bots". That verdict hides the only distinction that matters. Training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) collect content to train the models — blocking them keeps you out of future training data and does nothing to your citations. Search bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) index your pages so they can appear, with a link, in AI answers — these are the ones that decide whether you get cited. User fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) grab one page in real time because a person asked an assistant to look at it.
It fetches your live robots.txt, resolves the rules the way a crawler does — including the wildcard group — and reports each bot separately, grouped by tier. So you can see at a glance that you're opted out of training but still fully citable, or that a copied-and-pasted snippet quietly took you out of the citation pool.
Which AI crawlers to block, and why — the longer version, with sources.