Rank 302 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026
Does academia.edu block AI crawlers?
Yes, 11 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, academia.edu's robots.txt blocks 11 of the 17 AI crawlers we check from the whole site. It keeps the other 6 out of parts of the site. 8 of them are named in a group of their own; the others follow its rules for every crawler.
We did not request /llms.txt: robots.txt does not allow ContextFetchBot to fetch it. robots.txt does not allow ContextFetchBot to fetch the homepage, so we did not measure it.
Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules
From https://www.academia.edu/robots.txt (59,291 bytes, 63 user-agent groups), parsed per RFC 9309. Blocked: no path allowed. Partly blocked: some paths disallowed. The rule counts are those of the groups that apply.
| Crawler | Operator | Verdict | Rules that apply | Disallow rules | Allow rules |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Its own group | 2 | 5 |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Its own group | 39 | 4 |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Its own group | 39 | 4 |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | Partly blocked | Its own group | 38 | 4 |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | Partly blocked | Its own group | 38 | 4 |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Partly blocked | Its own group | 38 | 4 |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| Google-Extended | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 | |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| CCBot | Common Crawl | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| meta-externalagent | Meta | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
| ContextFetchBot (us) | ContextFetch | Blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 1 | 0 |
Read academia.edu through ContextFetch
GET /r/ returns a page as Markdown, with X-Raw-Tokens and X-Output-Tokens headers. Add ?q= and a question to get only the passages that answer it. No key needed for 25 requests a day; a free key has 2,500 credits. academia.edu's robots.txt blocks ContextFetchBot: our index and crawls skip what it disallows, and a page you ask for is fetched once on your behalf (see the bot page).
curl -si "https://api.contextfetch.dev/r/https://academia.edu/"curl -X POST https://api.contextfetch.dev/v1/keys/freeHow ContextFetchBot behaves · All sites and the method · Raw data
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Your free key comes with 2,500 credits, no signup. One credit reads one page.