Rank 215 in the Majestic Million · checked October 19, 2026
Does usatoday.com block AI crawlers?
Yes, 12 of 17. As of October 19, 2026, usatoday.com's robots.txt blocks 12 of the 17 AI crawlers we check from the whole site. It keeps the other 5 out of parts of the site. Every one of them is named in a group of its own.
Its /llms.txt answered HTTP 402. The homepage answered HTTP 402 to ContextFetchBot, so there was nothing to measure.
Each crawler, by its robots.txt rules
From https://www.usatoday.com/robots.txt (16,350 bytes, 288 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 | 10 |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 10 |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 10 |
| 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 | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 10 |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Blocked | Its own group | 1 | 0 |
| Google-Extended | Partly blocked | Its own group | 1 | 10 | |
| 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 | 2 | 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 (*) | 47 | 0 |
Read usatoday.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. usatoday.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://usatoday.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.