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Is Cloudflare or My Firewall Blocking AI Search Bots?

Many CDN and WAF configurations—including Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode—treat AI search crawlers as unverified scrapers, serving JS challenges or HTTP 403 Forbidden responses to GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot even when Googlebot passes cleanly.

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Related Questions

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AI Search & Bots

Is ChatGPT Blocked From Crawling My Website?

Test live if OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot can crawl your website or if Cloudflare, WAF rules, or robots.txt are blocking ChatGPT Search citations.
AI Search & Bots

What Should My robots.txt Look Like for AI Search Engines?

Audit your live robots.txt for AI search crawler access and generate a clean, spec-compliant robots.txt for Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot.
AI Search & Bots

Why Is Perplexity or Claude Not Citing My Website?

Diagnose why PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot fail to cite your domain. Check AI crawler parity, /llms.txt presence, and structured entity grounding.
llms.txt & Grounding

Does My Website Have a Valid /llms.txt File?

Check if your domain serves a valid /llms.txt file for AI search agents, verify markdown section formatting, and test linked URLs for 200 OK status.

Why This Matters for Search & AI Visibility

AI crawlers do not execute interactive CAPTCHA or browser Turnstile challenges. A 403 response at the CDN edge makes your entire domain invisible to generative search engines.

How to Fix It Permanently

Create an explicit WAF Skip / Allow rule for verified AI search user-agents (OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) and verify parity across all five user-agents.

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