wikihow.com: what it tells AI crawlers
On 27 October 2026, wikihow.com's robots.txt fully blocked GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot.
Last verified 2026-10-28 03:59 UTC (daily run of 2026-10-27). Proof for that day.
- Panel
- top 10k (Tranco)
- robots.txt
- ok (HTTP 200) · https://www.wikihow.com/robots.txt
unchanged since 2026-10-26 · sha25677b692277243824d…· 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 | allows | through the * group |
| Googlebot | allows | named in its own group |
| Google-Extended | allows | through the * 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 |
| Claude-Web | blocks | named in its own group |
| cohere-ai | 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 |
| facebookexternalhit | blocks | named in its own group |
| FirecrawlAgent | blocks | named in its own group |
| FriendlyCrawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| ICC-Crawler | blocks | named in its own group |
| ImagesiftBot | 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 |
| omgili | blocks | named in its own group |
| PetalBot | blocks | named in its own group |
| Scrapy | blocks | named in its own group |
| ShapBot | 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 |
| Webzio-Extended | blocks | named in its own group |
| YouBot | 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) | no |
| Sends noai / noimageai directives | no |
| Refused our fetcher (403 / challenge) | no |
robots.txt as recorded sha256 b46a9dd53f0975a5…
# # robots.txt for http://www.wikihow.com # based on wikipedia.org's robots.txt # # Crawlers that are kind enough to obey, but which we'd rather not have # unless they're feeding search engines. Sitemap: http://www.wikihow.com/sitemap_index.xml # If your bot supports such a thing using the 'Crawl-delay' or another # instruction, please let us know. We can add it to our robots.txt. # # Friendly, low-speed bots are welcome viewing article pages, but not # dynamically-generated pages please. Article pages contain our site's # real content. User-agent: UbiCrawler Disallow: / User-agent: DOC Disallow: / User-agent: Zao Disallow: / # Some bots are known to be trouble, particularly those designed to copy # entire sites. Please obey robots.txt. User-agent: sitecheck.internetseer.com Disallow: / User-agent: Zealbot Disallow: / User-agent: MSIECrawler Disallow: / User-agent: SiteSnagger Disallow: / User-agent: WebStripper Disallow: / User-agent: WebCopier Disallow: / User-agent: Fetch Disallow: / User-agent: Offline Explorer Disallow: / User-agent: Teleport Disallow: / User-agent: TeleportPro Disallow: / User-agent: WebZIP Disallow: / User-agent: linko Disallow: / User-agent: HTTrack Disallow: / User-agent: Microsoft.URL.Control Disallow: / User-agent: Xenu Disallow: / User-agent: larbin Disallow: / User-agent: libwww Disallow: / User-agent: ZyBORG Disallow: / User-agent: Download Ninja Disallow: / # wget in recursive mode uses too many resources for us. # Please read the man page and use it properly; there is a # --wait option you can use to set the delay between hits, # for instance. Please wait 3 seconds between each request. User-agent: wget Disallow: / # Doesn't follow robots.txt anyway, but... User-agent: k2spider Disallow: / # Requests many pages per second # http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html User-agent: NPBot Disallow: / # A capture bot, downloads gazillions of pages with no public benefit # http://www.webreaper.net/ User-agent: WebReaper Disallow: / User-agent: HMSE_Robot Disallow: / User-agent: archive.org Disallow: /api.php Disallow: /index.php Disallow: /Special: User-agent: Googlebot Allow: /Special:AllPages Allow: /Special:Block Allow: /Special:BlockList Allow: /Special:Categorylisting Allow: /Special:EmailUser Allow: /Special:LSearch Allow: /Special:NewPages Allow: /Special:PopularPages Allow: /Special:QABox Allow: /Special:Sitemap Allow: /Special:ThankAuthors Allow: /Special:UserLogin Allow: /index.php?*action=credits Allow: /index.php?*MathShowImage Allow: /index.php?*printable Disallow: /w/ Disallow: /forum/ Disallow: /index.php Disallow: /*feed=rss Disallow: /*action=delete Disallow: /*action=history Disallow: /Special: Disallow: /images/samplepdfs Disallow: /images/sampledocs*doc Disallow: /images/sampledocs*pdf Disallow: /images/sampledocs*txt Disallow: /*platform= Disallow: /*variant= Noindex: /w/ Noindex: /forum/ Noindex: /index.php Noindex: /*feed=rss Noindex: /*action=delete Noindex: /*action=history Noindex: /Special: Noindex: /images/samplepdfs Noindex: /images/sampledocs*doc Noindex: /images/sampledocs*pdf Noindex: /images/sampledocs*txt Noindex: /*platform= Noindex: /*variant= User-agent: * Allow: /Special:AllPages Allow: /Special:Categorylisting Allow: /Special:LSearch Allow: /Special:NewPages Allow: /Special:PopularPages Allow: /Special:QABox Allow: /Special:Sitemap Allow: /index.php?*MathShowImage Disallow: /w/ Disallow: /forum/ Disallow: /index.php Disallow: /*feed=rss Disallow: /*action=delete Disallow: /*action=edit Disallow: /*action=history Disallow: /*action=watch Disallow: /Special: Disallow: /images/samplepdfs Disallow: /images/sampledocs*doc Disallow: /images/sampledocs*pdf Disallow: /images/sampledocs*txt Disallow: /*platform= Disallow: /*variant=
robots.txt versions
| From | Through | State | Version | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-26 | 2026-10-27 | ok 200 | 77b692277243 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-09-16 CC-MAIN-2024-38 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | blocks | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | blocks |
| 2023-10-02 CC-MAIN-2023-40 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | blocks | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2022-10-03 CC-MAIN-2022-40 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2021-09-27 CC-MAIN-2021-39 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2020-09-28 CC-MAIN-2020-40 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2019-09-23 CC-MAIN-2019-39 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2018-09-24 CC-MAIN-2018-39 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-09-25 CC-MAIN-2017-39 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2017-01-23 CC-MAIN-2017-04 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2016-10-03 CC-MAIN-2016-40 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
| 2016-09-05 CC-MAIN-2016-36 | www.wikihow.com | ok view | allows | allows | unknown | allows | allows | unknown | allows |
Evidence
Every daily observation of wikihow.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/wikihow.com