Over the past few months, ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) bots have captured the attention of many people on the web.
Whatever your thoughts on AI bots, you may want to take action on your own website to block ChatGPT from crawling, indexing, and using your website content and data.
Thanks to Barry Schwartz’s helpful Search Engine Roundtable post this morning, you can block ChatGPT plugins in your website robots.txt file.
You’ll need to add a two lines of code to your robots.txt file, as explained in the ChatGPT-User documentation (Wayback Archive link).
For folks with WordPress sites, you have several options:
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For self-hosted WordPress sites, you can add the code directly to your site’s robots.txt file. If you’re comfortable editing robots.txt files.
Or, if you have a search engine optimization (SEO) plugin installed on your site, you’ll likely find an option to edit your robots.txt file within the plugin settings.
For example, in the All In One SEO plugin, choose Tools to edit your robots.txt file and select Save to save your updates.
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For sites hosted on WordPress.com, all sites have a robots.txt file. However, only sites with Business or ECommerce plans can edit/customize the robots.txt file.
This is the first post I’ve found about blocking AI bots from using your website’s data.
If you know of other posts discussing how to block AI bots from your website, share the info in the comments.
Update on April 19, 2023: Blocking may not work, if your website content has already been scraped by Google’s Large Language Model.
