cnet.com: what it tells AI crawlers
On 27 October 2026, cnet.com's robots.txt fully blocked GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot.
Last verified 2026-10-28 03:59 UTC (daily run of 2026-10-27). Proof for that day.
- Panel
- top 1k (Tranco)
- robots.txt
- ok (HTTP 200) · https://www.cnet.com/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-27 · sha2566300fd9712a37580…· view as recorded - The * group
- partial applies to every agent without its own group
Per AI bot, 2026-10-27
| User agent | Verdict | How |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| OAI-SearchBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| ChatGPT-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| ClaudeBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Claude-SearchBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Claude-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| PerplexityBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Perplexity-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| Googlebot | partial | through the * group |
| Google-Extended | partial | through the * group |
| Applebot-Extended | blocks | named in its own group |
| CCBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Bytespider | blocks | named in its own group |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | blocks | named in its own group |
| Amazonbot | blocks | named in its own group |
| AddSearchBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| AgentDataBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| AIWebIndex | blocks | named in its own group |
| amazon-QBusiness | blocks | named in its own group |
| AmazonBuyForMe | blocks | named in its own group |
| Amzn-SearchBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Amzn-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| anthropic-ai | blocks | named in its own group |
| ApifyBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| ApifyWebsiteContentCrawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| Applebot | blocks | named in its own group |
| atlassian-bot | blocks | named in its own group |
| AzureAI-SearchBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| BixelBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Bravebot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Brightbot | blocks | named in its own group |
| ChatGLM-Spider | blocks | named in its own group |
| Claude-Code | blocks | named in its own group |
| Claude-Web | blocks | named in its own group |
| Cloudflare-AutoRAG | blocks | named in its own group |
| CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| Code | blocks | named in its own group |
| cohere-ai | blocks | named in its own group |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| Cotoyogi | blocks | named in its own group |
| Cursor | blocks | named in its own group |
| DeepSeekBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Devin | blocks | named in its own group |
| Diffbot | blocks | named in its own group |
| DuckAssistBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| ExaBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| ExaSearchBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| FacebookBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Factset_spyderbot | blocks | named in its own group |
| FirecrawlAgent | blocks | named in its own group |
| GeistHaus-PageFetcher | blocks | named in its own group |
| GrokBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Hunyuan | blocks | named in its own group |
| iAskBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| iaskspider | blocks | named in its own group |
| ICC-Crawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| ImagesiftBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| imageSpider | blocks | named in its own group |
| kagi-fetcher | blocks | named in its own group |
| KeenableBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Kimi-Agent | blocks | named in its own group |
| Kimi-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| KlaviyoAIBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| KunatoCrawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| laion-huggingface-processor | blocks | named in its own group |
| LCC | blocks | named in its own group |
| LinerBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| LinkupBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Manus-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| meta-externalfetcher | blocks | named in its own group |
| meta-webindexer | blocks | named in its own group |
| MistralAI-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| NovaAct | blocks | named in its own group |
| omgili | blocks | named in its own group |
| omgilibot | blocks | named in its own group |
| opencode | blocks | named in its own group |
| PanguBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| PetalBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| PhindBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Poggio-Citations | blocks | named in its own group |
| qodercli | blocks | named in its own group |
| QualifiedBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Reflectionbot | blocks | named in its own group |
| SBIntuitionsBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Scrapy | blocks | named in its own group |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | blocks | named in its own group |
| Shap-User | blocks | named in its own group |
| ShapBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Spider | blocks | named in its own group |
| TavilyBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| TerraCotta | blocks | named in its own group |
| Timpibot | blocks | named in its own group |
| TongyiBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Trae | blocks | named in its own group |
| TwinAgent | blocks | named in its own group |
| UseAI | blocks | named in its own group |
| VelenPublicWebCrawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| Webzio-Extended | blocks | named in its own group |
| WRTNBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| xAI-Grok | blocks | named in its own group |
| YandexAdditionalBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| YiBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| YiyanBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| YouBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| ZanistaBot | blocks | named in its own group |
Other signals
| Publishes /llms.txt | no |
| Publishes /ai.txt | no |
| Publishes /.well-known/tdmrep.json | not observed |
| Reserves TDM rights (TDMRep file, header or meta) | not observed |
| Declares Content Signals (robots.txt or header) | no |
| Says ai-train=no in a Content Signal | no |
| Points to an RSL licence (robots.txt License line or Link header) | no |
| Answers with an x402 payment offer (lower bound: only the homepage is probed) | no |
| Answers HTTP 402 Payment Required (lower bound: only the homepage is probed) | no |
| Sends noai / noimageai directives | no |
| Refused our fetcher (403 / challenge) | no |
robots.txt as recorded sha256 cf285aacebdc85b2…
# www.robotstxt.org/ # www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 # # Ziff Davis content is made available for your non-commercial use subject to our # Terms of Use here: https://www.ziffdavis.com/terms-of-use # Use of any robot, crawler, or other tool to scrape, harvest, extract, or retrieve any content on # this website using automated means is prohibited without written permission from Ziff Davis. # Prohibited uses include but are not limited to: # (1) text and data mining under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single # Market; # (2) development or operation of artificial intelligence or machine learning software or # databases, including by training, fine-tuning, embedding, and retrieval-augmented generation; # (3) creating data sets containing our content or sharing it with others; and # (4) any commercial purposes. # Contact licensing@ziffdavis.com for assistance. User-agent: * Disallow: */*max-price=* Disallow: */*min-price=* Disallow: */Xhr* Disallow: */account-information/* Disallow: */ad/ad-cookie/* Disallow: */ajax/ Disallow: */alert/* Disallow: */cnet_global_app_redirect.xml Disallow: */component/* Disallow: */edit/ Disallow: */edit/change-email/* Disallow: */edit/change-password/* Disallow: */email/editor/* Disallow: */email/member/* Disallow: */email/newsletter/* Disallow: */error/* Disallow: */ext/make/ingest/* Disallow: */feature/* Disallow: */finder/*/*/?*filter=*_*_*_*_* Disallow: */finder/*/?*filter=*_*_*_*_* Disallow: */forums/* Disallow: */g00/* Disallow: */informacion-de-mi-cuenta/* Disallow: */members/* Disallow: */products/*?*filter=* Disallow: */roadshow/finder/* Disallow: */search/* Disallow: */user/* Disallow: */videos/manifest/* Disallow: */videos/secure/* Disallow: */videos/selector/* Disallow: */wrap-function* Disallow: */wrap-xhr* Disallow: */xhr* Disallow: *?sort=popularity* Disallow: *?sort=price* Disallow: *?sort=user-rating* Disallow: *hub-preview-version=* Disallow: /.well-known/* Disallow: /api/editionurlgenerator/ Disallow: /apple-news/* Disallow: /au/* Disallow: /es/* Disallow: /html/story/* Disallow: /index.php/* Disallow: /products/* Disallow: /uk/* User-agent: "008" User-agent: Applebot User-agent: AwarioRssBot User-agent: AwarioSmartBot User-agent: DDM-DCipher/1.0.7 User-agent: HTTrack User-agent: ImagesiftBot User-agent: Magpie-crawler User-agent: Nutch User-agent: Offline Explorer User-agent: Omgilibot User-agent: Peer39_crawler/1.0 User-agent: Scrapy User-agent: GPTBot Allow: /paid-content/news/how-galaxy-ai-camera-tools-help-you-take-better-photos-automatically-on-the-s25/ Allow: /paid-content/news/how-samsungs-galaxy-ai-boosts-gaming-performance/ Disallow: / Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/article/index.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/best.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/gallery/index.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/how-to/index.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/news.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/review/index.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/static.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/updating_story/index.xml Sitemap: https://www.cnet.com/sitemaps/video/index.xml
robots.txt versions
| From | Through | State | Version | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-27 | 2026-10-27 | ok 200 | 6300fd9712a3 | diff with previous |
| 2026-10-26 | 2026-10-26 | ok 200 | 0117f1d7196e |
Timeline of changes
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-27 | robots.txt changed |
Reconstructed history (Common Crawl)
From Common Crawl's robots.txt captures: what CCBot was served, one crawl per quarter. A separate series from the daily observations above; a 403 here means Common Crawl was refused, not this ledger.
| Crawl | Host | State | GPTBot | OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT-User | ClaudeBot | Claude-SearchBot | Claude-User | PerplexityBot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-15 CC-MAIN-2025-38 | www.cnet.com | ok view | blocks | partial | unknown | partial | partial | unknown | partial |
| 2024-09-16 CC-MAIN-2024-38 | www.cnet.com | ok view | blocks | partial | unknown | blocks | partial | unknown | partial |
| 2023-10-02 CC-MAIN-2023-40 | www.cnet.com | ok view | blocks | partial | unknown | partial | partial | unknown | partial |
| 2022-10-03 CC-MAIN-2022-40 | www.cnet.com | ok view | partial | partial | unknown | partial | partial | unknown | partial |
| 2021-09-27 CC-MAIN-2021-39 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2020-09-28 CC-MAIN-2020-40 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2019-09-23 CC-MAIN-2019-39 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2018-09-24 CC-MAIN-2018-39 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2018-01-29 CC-MAIN-2018-05 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-10-23 CC-MAIN-2017-43 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-09-25 CC-MAIN-2017-39 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-07-24 CC-MAIN-2017-30 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-04-24 CC-MAIN-2017-17 | cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-01-23 CC-MAIN-2017-04 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2016-10-03 CC-MAIN-2016-40 | www.cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2016-09-05 CC-MAIN-2016-36 | cnet.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
Evidence
Every daily observation of cnet.com is a leaf in that day's Merkle tree. Proof of the robots.txt line for 2026-10-27: audit path (JSON), day root and OpenTimestamps proof (complete (bitcoin block 973493)).
API: https://infrarabbit.com/crawlers/api/v1/policy/cnet.com