readthedocs.io: what it tells AI crawlers

On 27 October 2026, readthedocs.io'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://app.readthedocs.org/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-26 · sha256 e487fb28ff96a142… · 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 e487fb28ff96a142…

# Guidelines for automated access and crawling Read the Docs: https://docs.readthedocs.com/platform/stable/automated-access.html
#
# Bots should not be scraping from the Read the Docs maintainer dashboard in bulk.
# Automated access to documentation sites is allowed in accordance with the policies above.
# For everything else, use our API: https://docs.readthedocs.com/platform/stable/api/index.html

User-agent: *
Disallow: /accounts/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /profiles/
Disallow: /projects/*/builds/
Disallow: /projects/tags/
Disallow: /search/

# This was hitting our site and causing a lot of issues
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

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 readthedocs.io 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/readthedocs.io