Should plumbing companies and plumbers allow AI crawlers to access their website?

Yes — unless you have a specific reason to block them. For plumbing companies and plumbers, allowing AI crawler access is essential for being cited in AI search results.

AI crawlers to allow:

• GPTBot — OpenAI's crawler (ChatGPT)
• ChatGPT-User — ChatGPT's real-time browsing
• ClaudeBot — Anthropic's crawler (Claude)
• PerplexityBot — Perplexity's crawler
• Google-Extended — Google's AI training crawler (Gemini)
• Googlebot — Standard Google crawler (also feeds Gemini)
• Bingbot — Microsoft's crawler (feeds Copilot)

• If you block GPTBot, ChatGPT literally cannot read your website and cannot cite your business
• Blocking AI crawlers means opting out of AI search entirely
• Your competitors who allow access will get cited instead
• There's no downside for plumbing companies and plumbers — you want your business information accessible

• Subscription content sites (not applicable to most plumbing companies and plumbers)
• Sites with proprietary research (may want to block AI training but allow search)
• Sites with user-generated content that shouldn't be attributed to your business

The ideal setup allows all AI crawlers full access to your public pages while blocking internal/admin pages:

``` User-agent: GPTBot Allow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Allow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Allow: / ```

ClickRadius automatically checks your robots.txt during analysis and flags any AI crawlers that are blocked.