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Report . October 2026

The state of AI crawler access, October 2026

Drawn from 11 daily crawls of up to 3,693 Tranco-ranked domains, of which 3,660 could be measured.

Month in progress. These figures move with every nightly crawl until October 2026 ends, at which point the report is written to a permanent file and stops changing. Quote it with the measurement date attached, or wait for the seal.

Research and data by Fidget Labs BV, Breda, Netherlands. Published as CrawlIndex and free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.

15.6%
Block at least one answer-surface crawler
571 sites
4.1%
Block every answer-surface crawler
149 sites
14.2%
Publish an llms.txt
520 sites
64
Mean readiness score
Out of 100

What moved

Between 2026-10-01 and 2026-10-11, the number of measured sites blocking at least one answer-surface AI crawler fell by 3 sites. Sites publishing an llms.txt rose by 13 sites, and sites publishing an agents.md fell by 4 sites.

The mean readiness score across scored sites rose 0.21 points to 64.49.

8 sites answered an agent with HTTP 402 Payment Required. That is a pay-per-crawl gateway rather than a block: access is being metered and sold rather than refused.

Sites that could not be measured are excluded rather than counted as failures, so these totals are over the 3,660 domains actually observed. Method: /methodology. Coverage and its limits: /coverage.

Across the month

Blocking an answer-surface crawler574 to 571 over 11 crawls
Publishing llms.txt507 to 520 over 11 crawls
Mean readiness score64.28 to 64.49 over 11 crawls

Who set the policy

Blocking rate grouped by edge network. Sites behind varnish blocked at 27.8% against 2.6% behind google, which is a far wider spread than anything explained by what the sites themselves publish.

Blocking rate by edge network
Edge networkSitesBlocking AIProportion blockingMean score
Cloudflare1,108114 (10.3%)70.9
Amazon CloudFront43790 (20.6%)64.6
Akamai27739 (14.1%)68.1
Fastly21453 (24.8%)64.4
Google Cloud / GFE1564 (2.6%)57.8
Vercel533 (5.7%)74.8
Varnish3610 (27.8%)60.5
Alibaba Cloud CDN331 (3.0%)63.2
Azure Front Door271 (3.7%)61

By publishing platform

Blocking rate by publishing platform
PlatformSitesBlocking AIProportion blockingMean score
WordPress31044 (14.2%)70.6
Next.js30950 (16.2%)66.8
Adobe Experience Manager1376 (4.4%)65.5
Drupal1054 (3.8%)63.9
HubSpot CMS834 (4.8%)71.5
Contentful573 (5.3%)66.9
Nuxt531 (1.9%)63.3
Sanity303 (10.0%)76.4
Astro253 (12.0%)70.2

Blocking by crawler

AI crawlers by number of sites blocking them in October 2026
CrawlerOperatorBlocked byShareOver period
CCBotCommon Crawl48813.3%-4
BytespiderByteDance46712.8%+5
GPTBotOpenAI46512.7%-2
ClaudeBotAnthropic44112.0%+4
meta-externalagentMeta40111.0%+1
Google-ExtendedGoogle38410.5%-2
DiffbotDiffbot38210.4%+8
cohere-aiCohere37510.2%+5
Applebot-ExtendedApple36910.1%+5
AmazonbotAmazon3519.6%+2
PerplexityBotPerplexity3499.5%+2
YouBotYou.com3258.9%+2
ChatGPT-UserOpenAI3068.4%+8
DuckAssistBotDuckDuckGo2647.2%+5
Perplexity-UserPerplexity2627.2%+9
Claude-UserAnthropic2557.0%+7
MistralAI-UserMistral2516.9%+7
OAI-SearchBotOpenAI2496.8%+6
Claude-SearchBotAnthropic2476.7%+4
FirecrawlAgentFirecrawl2095.7%+5
TavilyBotTavily1945.3%+4
Google-NotebookLMGoogle1855.1%+4
kagi-fetcherKagi1624.4%+3

Policy changes this month

Where the index stood

The top and bottom of the leaderboard as it stands right now.

Most agent-ready

Least agent-ready

Citing this report

Free to quote and republish under CC BY 4.0. Credit Fidget Labs BV and include the measurement date so the claim stays checkable as the index moves.

CrawlIndex by Fidget Labs BV. "The state of AI crawler access, October 2026." https://crawlindex.org (measured 2026-10-11). Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Download the underlying dataset