B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
13.7%
13.7% -- share of sites blocking at least one ai crawler for AI crawlers (Q3 2026)
In a Q3 2026 crawl of 1,744 websites, 13.7% blocked at least one AI crawler in their robots.txt file.
- Only reflects robots.txt blocking, not firewall, CDN, or bot-protection rules
- Cannot distinguish between deliberate policy and copied blocklists
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
·
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
13.7%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
Q3 2026
Entity
Sample Size
1,744
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
95
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
AI Visibility
Primary
Tier A
https://www.ai-visibility.org.uk/blog/is-your-website-blocking-ai/ ↗
Source Article
Is Your Website Blocking AI Crawlers? How to Check | AI Visibility
Why your website might be invisible to AI crawlers
Your website might be invisible to AI, and you'd never know it.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about your industry, your competitors show up. You don't. Not because your content is weak or your site is new, but because something techni…
Original Research
AI Visibility
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Quarterly robots.txt crawl; trend across quarters: 11.6% (Q1), 13.5% (Q2), 13.7% (Q3)
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI crawlers: 13.7% share of sites blocking at least one ai crawler. Source: AI Visibility (Q3 2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/sites-blocking-at-least-one-ai-crawler-q3-2026
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/sites-blocking-at-least-one-ai-crawler-q3-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>13.7%</strong> -- share of sites blocking at least one ai crawler for AI crawlers<br><small>Source: AI Visibility (Q3 2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/sites-blocking-at-least-one-ai-crawler-q3-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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