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Rank 414 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026

Does news.google.com block AI crawlers?

Yes, 6 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, news.google.com's robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot and CCBot from the whole site. It keeps the other 11 out of parts of the site. 6 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. Its homepage is 464,484 tokens of raw HTML, 109 as Markdown (0.0%) and 109 pruned for the question “What is news.google.com?”.

Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules

From https://news.google.com/robots.txt (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.

CrawlerOperatorVerdictRules that applyDisallow rulesAllow rules
GPTBotOpenAIBlockedIts own group10
ChatGPT-UserOpenAIBlockedIts own group10
OAI-SearchBotOpenAIPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
ClaudeBotAnthropicBlockedIts own group10
Claude-UserAnthropicPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
Claude-SearchBotAnthropicPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
anthropic-aiAnthropicBlockedIts own group10
PerplexityBotPerplexityBlockedIts own group10
Perplexity-UserPerplexityPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
Google-ExtendedGooglePartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
Applebot-ExtendedApplePartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
CCBotCommon CrawlBlockedIts own group10
BytespiderByteDancePartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
AmazonbotAmazonPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
meta-externalagentMetaPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
cohere-aiCoherePartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
DiffbotDiffbotPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
ContextFetchBot (us)ContextFetchPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)113
Checked October 19, 2026 by ContextFetchBot. Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are robots.txt tokens that control use of content for AI, not separate crawlers.

Its homepage in tokens

https://news.google.com/home?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en, fetched once and converted locally with the ContextFetch engine. Tokens are characters divided by four, rounded up, the count the API reports in its X-Raw-Tokens and X-Output-Tokens headers.

Tokens of the news.google.com homepage as raw HTML, Markdown and pruned context, October 19, 2026
GroupRaw HTMLMarkdownPruned
Tokens464,484109109

Read news.google.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. news.google.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://news.google.com/"

How 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.