Rank 97 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026
Does cnn.com block AI crawlers?
Yes, 15 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, cnn.com's robots.txt blocks 15 of the 17 AI crawlers we check from the whole site. It keeps the other 2 out of parts of the site. 15 of them are named in a group of their own; the others follow its rules for every crawler.
It has no llms.txt (HTTP 404). The homepage could not be fetched and measured.
Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules
From https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt (3,515 bytes, 3 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 | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Google-Extended | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 36 | 1 | |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| CCBot | Common Crawl | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| meta-externalagent | Meta | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 36 | 1 |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| ContextFetchBot (us) | ContextFetch | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 36 | 1 |
Read cnn.com 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. cnn.com's robots.txt partly 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://cnn.com/"curl -X POST https://api.contextfetch.dev/v1/keys/freeHow ContextFetchBot behaves · All sites and the method · Raw data
Give your agent the web
Your free key comes with 2,500 credits, no signup. One credit reads one page.