independent.co.uk: what it tells AI crawlers

On 27 October 2026, independent.co.uk's robots.txt allowed all of GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended, 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.independent.co.uk/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-26 · sha256 b45123ef0320e9ca… · view as recorded

The * group

allows applies to every agent without its own group

Per AI bot, 2026-10-27

Other signals

robots.txt as recorded sha256 73ff4801eedaff57…

User-agent: *

# Files
Disallow: /CHANGELOG.txt
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /INSTALL.mysql.txt
Disallow: /INSTALL.pgsql.txt
Disallow: /INSTALL.sqlite.txt
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /INSTALL.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /MAINTAINERS.txt
Disallow: /update.php
Disallow: /UPGRADE.txt
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
# Paths (clean URLs)
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /comment/reply/
Disallow: /filter/tips/
Disallow: /node/add/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /user/register/
Disallow: /user/password/
Disallow: /user/login/
Disallow: /user/logout/
Disallow: /syndication/reuse-permission-form
Disallow: /internal-api/
Disallow: /article-comments/
Disallow: /login-authorization
Disallow: /subscriber/
# Paths (no clean URLs)
Disallow: /?q=admin/
Disallow: /?q=comment/reply/
Disallow: /?q=filter/tips/
Disallow: /?q=node/add/
Disallow: /?q=search/
Disallow: /?q=user/password/
Disallow: /?q=user/register/
Disallow: /?q=user/login/
Disallow: /?q=user/logout/
Disallow: /pugpig/
Disallow: /videorequest
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /pwamp/fbi/

# Ignore refresh URLs
Disallow: /*ILC-refresh

User-agent: Nutch
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://www.independent.co.uk/sitemaps/googlenews
Sitemap: https://www.independent.co.uk/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.independent.co.uk/sitemaps/indytv/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.independent.co.uk/sitemaps/indytv/googlenews.xml
Sitemap: https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/videos/sitemap.xml

robots.txt versions

Timeline of changes

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.

Evidence

Every daily observation of independent.co.uk 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/independent.co.uk