Chrome Extension Support

AI Crawler Check

Support and documentation for the AI Crawler Check browser extension. If something is not working or you have a question, the answer is probably below.

What the extension does

Click the extension icon on any website and it reads that site's robots.txt file, then shows you whether each known AI crawler user agent is allowed or blocked. It also checks whether the site publishes an llms.txt file, and whether the page you are on carries restrictive meta robots tags.

It covers 20 AI crawler user agents across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Meta, Apple, Amazon, ByteDance, Common Crawl, Cohere, Mistral, DuckDuckGo, the Allen Institute, and Diffbot.

How to use it

  1. Open the website you want to check.
  2. Click the AI Crawler Check icon in your Chrome toolbar.
  3. Read the verdict for each bot. Use the copy button to take a full plain-text report away with you.

Nothing runs until you click the icon, and it only ever looks at the tab you clicked it on.

Reading the results

Blocked The bot is disallowed from the entire site with Disallow: /.

Partial The bot can reach the site, but some paths are disallowed.

Allowed No restrictions apply to that bot.

The chip shows the site-wide verdict. The smaller line underneath tells you whether the specific page you are on is blocked or allowed, in the cases where that differs from the site-wide answer.

Parsing follows RFC 9309: the longest matching rule wins, ties resolve in favour of Allow, and a named user-agent group overrides the * group.

Permissions, and why they are needed

activeTab
Reads the URL of the tab you clicked on, so the extension can fetch that site's robots.txt and llms.txt. It is granted only on your click, and only for that tab.
scripting
Reads the meta robots tags out of the current page's HTML.

There are no other permissions, no background activity, no accounts, no analytics, and no servers. See the privacy policy for the full statement.

Troubleshooting

The check fails or returns nothing on some sites

If a site redirects its robots.txt to a different hostname, for example from the apex domain to www, the fetch can fail. The activeTab permission only grants access to the domain you are actually on. Open the site's main domain directly and run the check again from there.

The site has no robots.txt

Then no crawler is restricted by it, and every bot reads as allowed. That is the correct answer, not an error.

Results disagree with another tool

Most robots.txt checkers ignore the longest-match rule and just take the first matching line. This extension follows the RFC. Where the two disagree, check the actual file and count the path lengths.

The icon is greyed out

The extension does not run on Chrome's internal pages such as chrome://extensions, the Web Store, or local files. Move to a normal http or https page.

Contact

Questions, bugs, or a site that produces a wrong verdict: email joshmarwords@gmail.com. If you are reporting a wrong verdict, include the URL so the robots.txt can be checked directly.