medium.com: what it tells AI crawlers

On 27 October 2026, medium.com's robots.txt partly blocked GPTBot and ClaudeBot; it also referenced an RSL licence.

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://medium.com/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-26 · sha256 fe87c9fc79edeba1… · view as recorded

The * group

allows applies to every agent without its own group

Per AI bot, 2026-10-27

Other signals

RSL licence: https://medium.com/license.xml

robots.txt as recorded sha256 6254bca57661a2e7…

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /m/
Disallow: /me/
Disallow: /@me$
Disallow: /@me/
Disallow: /*/edit$
Disallow: /*/*/edit$
Allow: /_/
Allow: /_/api/users/*/meta
Allow: /_/api/users/*/profile/stream
Allow: /_/api/posts/*/responses
Allow: /_/api/posts/*/responsesStream
Allow: /_/api/posts/*/related
Sitemap: https://medium.com/sitemap/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 medium.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/medium.com