Quick answerDo different AI crawlers require different robots.txt rules? Yes, most major AI crawlers publish their own distinct user-agent string and honor robots.txt directives targeted at that specific agent, so a single generic disallow rule will not consistently cover every crawler; maintain an explicit, named list rather than one blanket rule. What about content behind a free registration wall, not a paid one? Treat it the same as any other authenticated content for this policy; the presence of a login step, not whether payment is required, is the relevant boundary for crawler access.
Quick answer
Default to allowing indexing of your published, public-facing content (blog posts, documentation, pricing pages) since being cited by answer engines is now a meaningful discovery channel, but explicitly block crawlers from any authenticated, customer-specific, or paywalled content through your robots.txt and crawler-access rules. Where you can express a preference through the crawler's own supported mechanism, request attribution back to the specific page a claim came from, not just your brand name in general, since a specific-page citation is what actually drives referral traffic and lets you correct a claim if the citing engine gets something wrong.
This is the reverse direction of your own agent's web access policy
Should your AI agent have live web access, or stay on a curated knowledge base covers what your own customer-facing agent is allowed to read from the outside internet. This post is the mirror question: what outside systems, crawlers, and LLMs are allowed to read and cite from you. The two policies are set independently and can reasonably land on different defaults, since the risk profile of your agent reading unreliable outside content is not the same as the risk profile of an outside system misreading or misattributing your own published content.
Default open for public marketing and documentation content
Content you already intend for public discovery (blog posts, help-center articles, pricing pages, product documentation) gains more from being indexable and citable by AI answer engines than it risks, since a growing share of buyer research now happens through an AI answer summarizing sources rather than a customer clicking through search results one at a time. Blocking this content from AI crawlers trades a real, growing discovery channel for a marginal and largely theoretical protection, since the content was already public and readable by any human visitor anyway.
Default closed for anything authenticated or customer-specific
Anything behind a login, any page rendering customer-specific data, and any paywalled or gated content should be explicitly excluded from crawler access, the same way it should already be excluded from ordinary search-engine indexing. A crawler that can authenticate as a logged-in session, whether your own agent's or a customer's, and then surface that content into a third-party AI's training or retrieval corpus is a data-exposure incident, not a normal indexing outcome, regardless of whether the crawler operator intended it that way.
Ask for citation, not just a blanket brand mention
Where the crawler or platform supports a citation preference (several major AI answer engines now do, through structured metadata or a stated citation policy), request that specific claims trace back to the specific page they came from, not a generic mention of your company name. A specific citation lets a customer click through to verify the claim themselves and lets you find and correct a citation that misrepresents what your content actually says, neither of which a generic brand mention supports.
Accuracy of what gets cited is still your responsibility
If an AI answer engine cites your published content and gets the claim wrong, that is often a sign your original content was ambiguous enough to be misread by a summarizing system, the same quality bar covered in truth-in-marketing for AI agent capability claims applied to your own published pages rather than your agent's live conversation output. Treat a pattern of AI-engine misattribution as a signal to tighten the source content's wording, not just a downstream problem to shrug off as someone else's error.
Being cited raises a different ownership question than being read
A crawler summarizing and citing your published words is a different situation from a system reusing or repackaging substantial original content wholesale. Who owns the IP in content an AI agent generates for your customer covers the ownership question for content your own agent produces; watch for the same question in reverse when a third-party AI system's output starts to look less like a citation of your page and more like a substantial reproduction of it.