Rank 69 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026
Does nytimes.com block AI crawlers?
Yes, 16 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, nytimes.com's robots.txt blocks 16 of the 17 AI crawlers we check from the whole site. It keeps the other 1 out of parts of the site. Every one of them is named in a group of its own.
It has no llms.txt (HTTP 404). The homepage answered HTTP 403 to ContextFetchBot, so there was nothing to measure.
Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules
From https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt (8,547 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 | 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 | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 | |
| 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 | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| meta-externalagent | Meta | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| 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 (*) | 86 | 23 |
Read nytimes.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. nytimes.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://nytimes.com/"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.