Question 1

Why are AI crawlers blocked even when robots.txt allows them?

Accepted Answer

Robots.txt is only the policy layer. Firewalls and CDN bot protections act before your site answers, and their default rules often catch AI crawlers. That kind of block is invisible from a robots.txt read; it shows up only when someone requests the page the way a bot would.

Question 2

Can a CDN or firewall block AI crawlers silently?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is the most common silent failure. A bot-management rule tightened for scrapers can take AI crawlers down with it, and nothing on your site looks different. Continuous checks catch the regression when it happens instead of months later.

Question 3

What is the difference between a robots.txt block and a firewall block?

Accepted Answer

A robots.txt block is your published policy: the fix is editing a Disallow rule. A firewall or CDN block happens in infrastructure before the page answers: the fix lives in your provider's bot settings. Citlyze incidents name which of the two happened, and the vendor when it is identifiable.

Question 4

What happens when an access incident is detected?

Accepted Answer

An incident opens for that bot and page with the cause attached, and the Bot access incident alert rule can notify you by email, Slack, or Teams. When access recovers, the incident resolves automatically. After you change robots.txt or firewall rules, Re-check now confirms the fix immediately.

Question 5

How many pages can I monitor?

Accepted Answer

Bot access monitoring covers 5 pages on Starter, 25 on Growth, and 100 on Pro and above. Your homepage and most-cited pages are seeded automatically, and you can add more up to your plan's limit.

Question 6

How is this different from AI Crawler Tracking?

Accepted Answer

Bot Access Monitoring answers "can bots reach my pages?" with active checks. AI Crawler Tracking answers "do they?" by recording real crawler visits. Used together, an access regression shows up in both: the incident tells you why, and the visit data confirms when bots return.

Question 7

How is this different from the free AI crawler access checker?

Accepted Answer

The free checker reads a page's robots.txt once, and says so: it cannot see CDN or firewall blocks from a single robots read. Monitoring requests your pages the way each bot would, on a schedule, so it sees the infrastructure layer too and alerts you when something changes.

Question 8

Does bot access monitoring work behind Cloudflare?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Checks request your pages from outside, exactly like a bot would, so Cloudflare and similar layers are part of what is tested. One caveat: checks present each bot's user agent from Citlyze servers, so sites that allow-list verified bot IP ranges can show as blocked here even when the real bot gets through.

Question 9

Will it flag bots I block on purpose?

Accepted Answer

No. A deliberate robots.txt rule is treated as policy, not a problem, and training-only bots are excluded from incident alerts, since blocking those is usually intentional. Alerts are for regressions: a bot that could reach a page and suddenly cannot.

Know when AI crawlers lose access to your site

Every monitored page, checked per bot

An alert that names the cause

Monitoring that respects your rules

Bot access monitoring

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