The top,771 sites block at least one AI search crawler

Sep 12, 2026 · 12:25 PM UTC ·1 min read · 0 reactions · 0 comments · 5 views

More from Lastminutedealshq ai Compare coverage Trending Talk Blindspots Daily Sources Live wire

TL;DR · WeSearch summary

The full list with each site's result, from a 2026-09-07 census.The shorter list covers 32 names most people recognise. Of the 2,771 sites in the census that served a robots.txt, 368 block at least one of the three crawlers that feed AI answers, and 200 block all three. A red mark means that engine is not allowed to read the site root, so it cannot cite the site.

Key facts

▪The full list with each site's result, from a 2026-09-07 census.The shorter list covers 32 names most people recognise.
▪Of the 2,771 sites in the census that served a robots.txt, 368 block at least one of the three crawlers that feed AI answers, and 200 block all three.
▪A red mark means that engine is not allowed to read the site root, so it cannot cite the site.

About this source

Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,549 of its stories.

All Hacker News (AI / LLM) coverage →

Original article

Lastminutedealshq

Read full at Lastminutedealshq →

Story provenance

Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record

inspect →

Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.

Record

Original publisher	Lastminutedealshq
Canonical URL	https://ai-visibility.lastminutedealshq.com/sites-blocking-ai-search
Publication time	Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:25:58 +0000
Retrieval time	2026-09-12T12:32:50.863Z
Last seen	2026-09-12T12:32:50.863Z
Headline source	Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite)
Excerpt source	publisher body
Excerpt method	First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited.
Summary	WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer)
Summary source text	contentText
Citation coverage	Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL.
Cluster	CDgCRSyoh51f · 1 stories
Cluster logic	Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison.
Ranking reason	Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking.
Publisher visit	Yes — open original
Substitutes article?	No — link-out required for full text

Rights status (four layers)

Publisher-declared

No publisher-confirmed rights record for this source yet.

Machine-readable

No source-specific machine-readable restriction detected beyond the public feed.

WeSearch interpretation

WeSearch declared handling (basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed). This is WeSearch policy, not a legal grant on the publisher's behalf.

Unknown

Retrieval and training permissions are not asserted unless the publisher confirms them.

WeSearch handling by dimension

Indexing	May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)?	Allowed
Snippet	May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown?	Allowed
AI summary	May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article?	Limited
Retrieval / RAG	May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation?	Not asserted
Model training	May the content be used to train AI models?	Not asserted
Commercial reuse	May the content be reused commercially?	Not permitted

Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.

Open original publisher → Source rights JSON → Machine-readable provenance → Rights framework → WESEARCH-STORY-PROVENANCE-V1

Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand

AI visibility checkerllms.txt generator and validatorrobots.txt checkerCrawler censusWho blocks AI searchFull block listGuidesAI crawlers Every site in the top 5,000 that blocks an AI search crawler368 of the 2,771 sites with a robots.txt block OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot, so they cannot be cited by that engine. The full list with each site's result, from a 2026-09-07 census.The shorter list covers 32 names most people recognise. This is all of them. Of the 2,771 sites in the census that served a robots.txt, 368 block at least one of the three crawlers that feed AI answers, and 200 block all three. A red mark means that engine is not allowed to read the site root, so it cannot cite the site.

…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lastminutedealshq.

Anonymous · no account needed

Discussion

0 comments