How to Allow AI Crawlers on Squarespace
If your robots.txt blocks crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those AI tools cannot read your pages, which can reduce how often you are cited. Rules like this are sometimes added by security plugins, hosts or templates without the owner realising.
The fix on Squarespace
Go to Settings > Crawlers and make sure the box to block known artificial intelligence crawlers is unchecked. Squarespace controls AI crawler access through this checkbox rather than a robots.txt file you edit. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt afterwards to confirm.
Builder menus change over time. If a label looks different, look for the closest option and check Squarespace's help centre.
What to know about Squarespace
Crawler control, simplified
Two toggles, not a file editor
Settings → Crawlers gives two checkboxes: block search engines entirely, or block a fixed list of 26 named AI crawlers entirely.
Can't grant access to one AI crawler while blocking another
No
The Crawlers panel writes exactly two kinds of rules: on or off for search engines, on or off for the whole bundled list of AI user agents.
Why this matters
Blocking AI crawlers means ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and other AI tools cannot read your content. Even if they have already indexed some of it, keeping them blocked stops them from refreshing and citing your latest pages.
How to check it worked
- Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for lines naming GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot, or a blanket "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *".
- Paste the file into the Robots.txt Tester, which shows the result for each crawler on any page path you enter.
Common questions
Should I allow every AI crawler?
That is a business decision. Allowing them makes it possible for AI tools to read and cite your content. Blocking them keeps your content out of those tools but may reduce visibility. Different bots do different jobs, such as training versus live search, so check each vendor's documentation.
Is it my site or Squarespace that is blocking them?
Check your robots.txt first. If the rule is there, it came from a setting, plugin or template. The steps above show where to change it on this platform.
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