Rank 73 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026
Does medium.com block AI crawlers?
Partly. As of October 19, 2026, medium.com's robots.txt blocks none of the 17 AI crawlers we check from the whole site, but keeps all 17 out of parts of it. 6 of them are named in a group of their own; the others follow its rules for every crawler.
Its /llms.txt answered HTTP 403. The homepage answered HTTP 403 to ContextFetchBot, so there was nothing to measure.
Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules
From https://medium.com/robots.txt (884 bytes, 2 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 | 1 | 7 |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 7 |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| Google-Extended | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 | |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 7 |
| CCBot | Common Crawl | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 7 |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 7 |
| meta-externalagent | Meta | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 7 |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
| ContextFetchBot (us) | ContextFetch | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 15 | 5 |
Read medium.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. medium.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://medium.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.