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Rank 1,044 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026

Does space.com block AI crawlers?

Yes, 5 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, space.com's robots.txt blocks Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, Amazonbot, meta-externalagent and Diffbot from the whole site. It keeps the other 12 out of parts of the site. 5 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). Its homepage is 425,975 tokens of raw HTML, 55 as Markdown (0.0%) and 30 pruned for the question “What is space.com?”.

Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules

From https://www.space.com/robots.txt (1,730 bytes, 5 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
GPTBotOpenAIPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
ChatGPT-UserOpenAIPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
OAI-SearchBotOpenAIPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
ClaudeBotAnthropicPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
Claude-UserAnthropicPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
Claude-SearchBotAnthropicPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
anthropic-aiAnthropicPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
PerplexityBotPerplexityPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
Perplexity-UserPerplexityPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
Google-ExtendedGooglePartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
Applebot-ExtendedAppleBlockedIts own group10
CCBotCommon CrawlPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
BytespiderByteDanceBlockedIts own group10
AmazonbotAmazonBlockedIts own group10
meta-externalagentMetaBlockedIts own group10
cohere-aiCoherePartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
DiffbotDiffbotBlockedIts own group10
ContextFetchBot (us)ContextFetchPartly blockedRules for all crawlers (*)220
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://www.space.com/, 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 space.com homepage as raw HTML, Markdown and pruned context, October 19, 2026
GroupRaw HTMLMarkdownPruned
Tokens425,9755530

Read space.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. space.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://space.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.