telegraph.co.uk: what it tells AI crawlers

On 26 October 2026, telegraph.co.uk's robots.txt fully blocked GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot.

Last verified 2026-10-26 21:13 UTC (daily run of 2026-10-26). Proof for that day.

Panel: top 1k (Tranco)
robots.txt: ok (HTTP 200) · https://www.telegraph.co.uk/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-26 · sha256 2aff8d5f0e77abba… · view as recorded
The * group: allows applies to every agent without its own group

Per AI bot, 2026-10-26

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	allows	through the * group
Google-Extended	allows	named in its own 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
anthropic-ai	blocks	named in its own group
bedrockbot	blocks	named in its own group
ChatGLM-Spider	blocks	named in its own group
Claude-Web	blocks	named in its own group
cohere-ai	blocks	named in its own group
Cotoyogi	blocks	named in its own group
DeepSeekBot	blocks	named in its own group
Diffbot	blocks	named in its own group
DuckAssistBot	blocks	named in its own group
FacebookBot	blocks	named in its own group
FriendlyCrawler	blocks	named in its own group
Google-CloudVertexBot	blocks	named in its own group
GoogleOther	blocks	named in its own group
GoogleOther-Image	blocks	named in its own group
GoogleOther-Video	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
ISSCyberRiskCrawler	blocks	named in its own group
KunatoCrawler	blocks	named in its own group
meta-externalfetcher	blocks	named in its own group
MistralAI-User	blocks	named in its own group
omgili	blocks	named in its own group
omgilibot	blocks	named in its own group
PanguBot	blocks	named in its own group
PetalBot	blocks	named in its own group
QualifiedBot	blocks	named in its own group
Scrapy	blocks	named in its own group
TikTokSpider	blocks	named in its own group
Timpibot	blocks	named in its own group
VelenPublicWebCrawler	blocks	named in its own group
WARDBot	blocks	named in its own group
Webzio-Extended	blocks	named in its own group
WRTNBot	blocks	named in its own group

Other signals

Publishes /llms.txt	no
Publishes /ai.txt	no
Publishes /.well-known/tdmrep.json	no
Reserves TDM rights (TDMRep file, header or meta)	no
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)	yes
Sends noai / noimageai directives	no
Refused our fetcher (403 / challenge)	no

robots.txt versions

From	Through	State	Version
2026-10-26	2026-10-27	ok 200	`2aff8d5f0e77`

Timeline of changes

Date	What changed
No changes since the first observation (2026-10-26).

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
2026-09-21 CC-MAIN-2026-39	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2024-09-16 CC-MAIN-2024-38	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	blocks	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2021-09-27 CC-MAIN-2021-39	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2020-09-28 CC-MAIN-2020-40	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2019-09-23 CC-MAIN-2019-39	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2018-09-24 CC-MAIN-2018-39	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2017-09-25 CC-MAIN-2017-39	www.telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2016-09-05 CC-MAIN-2016-36	telegraph.co.uk	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows

Evidence

Every daily observation of telegraph.co.uk is a leaf in that day's Merkle tree. Proof of the robots.txt line for 2026-10-26: audit path (JSON), day root and OpenTimestamps proof (complete (bitcoin block 973294)).

API: https://infrarabbit.com/crawlers/api/v1/policy/telegraph.co.uk