Rank 1,030 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026
Does thefreedictionary.com block AI crawlers?
Yes, 13 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, thefreedictionary.com's robots.txt blocks 13 of the 17 AI crawlers we check from the whole site. It keeps the other 4 out of parts of the site. 13 of them are named in a group of their own; the others follow its rules for every crawler.
Its /llms.txt returns an HTML page, not an llms.txt file. The homepage answered HTTP 403 to ContextFetchBot, so there was nothing to measure.
Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules
From https://www.thefreedictionary.com/robots.txt (1,146 bytes, 4 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 | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 8 | 0 |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 8 | 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 | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| meta-externalagent | Meta | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 8 | 0 |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 8 | 0 |
| ContextFetchBot (us) | ContextFetch | Partly blocked | Rules for all crawlers (*) | 8 | 0 |
Read thefreedictionary.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. thefreedictionary.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://thefreedictionary.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.