usatoday.com: what it tells AI crawlers

On 27 October 2026, usatoday.com's robots.txt fully blocked 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://eu.usatoday.com/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-26 · sha256 7ac5cfceb70ab70e… · view as recorded
The * group: allows 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	allows	through the * group
Google-Extended	blocks	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
AddSearchBot	blocks	named in its own group
aiHitBot	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
Andibot	blocks	named in its own group
Anomura	blocks	named in its own group
anthropic-ai	blocks	named in its own group
ApifyBot	blocks	named in its own group
Applebot	blocks	named in its own group
atlassian-bot	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-Web	blocks	named in its own group
Cloudflare-AutoRAG	blocks	named in its own group
CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler	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
Crawlspace	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
Diffbot-User	blocks	named in its own group
DuckAssistBot	blocks	named in its own group
EchoboxBot	blocks	named in its own group
ExaBot	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
FriendlyCrawler	blocks	named in its own group
Gemini-Deep-Research	blocks	named in its own group
Google-Agent	blocks	named in its own group
Google-CloudVertexBot	blocks	named in its own group
Google-NotebookLM	blocks	named in its own group
GoogleAgent-Mariner	blocks	named in its own group
GoogleOther	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
ISSCyberRiskCrawler	blocks	named in its own group
KlaviyoAIBot	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
OpenAI	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
QualifiedBot	blocks	named in its own group
QuillBot	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
ShapBot	blocks	named in its own group
Spider	blocks	named in its own group
TavilyBot	blocks	named in its own group
TikTokSpider	blocks	named in its own group
Timpibot	blocks	named in its own group
TwinAgent	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
YandexAdditional	blocks	named in its own group
YandexAdditionalBot	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	not observed
Publishes /ai.txt	not observed
Publishes /.well-known/tdmrep.json	not observed
Reserves TDM rights (TDMRep file, header or meta)	not observed
Declares Content Signals (robots.txt or header)	not observed
Says ai-train=no in a Content Signal	not observed
Points to an RSL licence (robots.txt License line or Link header)	not observed
Answers with an x402 payment offer (lower bound: only the homepage is probed)	not observed
Answers HTTP 402 Payment Required (lower bound: only the homepage is probed)	not observed
Sends noai / noimageai directives	not observed
Refused our fetcher (403 / challenge)	no

robots.txt as recorded sha256 7783fe3b72baf968…

# robots.txt for http://www.usatoday.com/

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /story/sponsor-story/
Disallow: /picture-gallery/sponsor-story/
Disallow: /videos/sponsor-story/
Disallow: /longform/sponsor-story/
Disallow: /pages/interactives/sponsor-story/

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /errors
Disallow: /interactive/
Disallow: /userauth/
Disallow: /ugc/
Disallow: /feeds/
Disallow: /services/
Disallow: /facebook/
Disallow: /version-info/
Disallow: /longform/draft/
Disallow: /story/draft/
Disallow: /topic/*/smart/
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /module-showcase/

Disallow: /optimus

Disallow: /exp-cruise

Disallow: /exp-las-vegas2

Disallow: /exp-faw

Disallow: /exp-caribbean

Disallow: /exp-beach

Disallow: /exp-cruise2



Sitemap: http://www.usatoday.com/web_sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.usatoday.com/news_sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.usatoday.com/image_sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.usatoday.com/video_sitemap_index.xml

robots.txt versions

From	Through	State	Version
2026-10-26	2026-10-27	ok 200	`7ac5cfceb70a`

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.usatoday.com	ok view	blocks	blocks	unknown	blocks	blocks	unknown	blocks
2025-09-15 CC-MAIN-2025-38	www.usatoday.com	ok view	blocks	blocks	unknown	blocks	blocks	unknown	blocks
2024-09-16 CC-MAIN-2024-38	www.usatoday.com	ok view	blocks	blocks	unknown	blocks	allows	unknown	blocks
2023-10-02 CC-MAIN-2023-40	www.usatoday.com	ok view	blocks	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2022-10-03 CC-MAIN-2022-40	www.usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2021-09-27 CC-MAIN-2021-39	www.usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2020-09-28 CC-MAIN-2020-40	www.usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2019-09-23 CC-MAIN-2019-39	www.usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2018-09-24 CC-MAIN-2018-39	www.usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2018-01-29 CC-MAIN-2018-05	usatoday.com	redirect-only	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown
2017-10-23 CC-MAIN-2017-43	usatoday.com	redirect-only	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown
2017-09-25 CC-MAIN-2017-39	usatoday.com	redirect-only	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown
2017-07-24 CC-MAIN-2017-30	usatoday.com	redirect-only	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown
2017-04-24 CC-MAIN-2017-17	usatoday.com	redirect-only	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown	unknown
2017-01-23 CC-MAIN-2017-04	usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2016-10-03 CC-MAIN-2016-40	usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows
2016-09-05 CC-MAIN-2016-36	usatoday.com	ok view	allows	allows	unknown	allows	allows	unknown	allows

Evidence

Every daily observation of usatoday.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/usatoday.com