Does Squarespace block AI bots by default?

By Matt Kerr·Published 12 November 2026

Squarespace crawler settings says: Squarespace leaves Block known artificial intelligence crawlers unchecked by default. It says that adds no AI exclusion requests to robots.txt. Five of the six names here appear in its blocking list. PerplexityBot does not appear in that list.

Open Settings > Crawlers to inspect the checkbox. Checking it requests that listed bots stop crawling your site. The guide says compliance is voluntary and this control cannot limit its request to selected pages.

Rules for each bot

Source: Squarespace crawler settings, read 12 November 2026.

Which names the checkbox covers

Squarespace crawler settings says: The Squarespace list includes GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot. All five use the same checkbox. The saved list has other names too, and Squarespace says it may add more as AI changes. Read the file on your own domain after editing the setting because that file shows the request your site is making today.

PerplexityBot is absent from the published list. The docs do not say that checking the box blocks it or describe a separate switch for it. Squarespace asks owners to contact it with a feature request for a bot that is missing. The table keeps that uncertainty visible instead of treating a control for known crawlers as a promise about every AI service.

Change the site-wide request

Squarespace crawler settings says: In Settings, choose Crawlers and check Block known artificial intelligence crawlers to request exclusion. Leave it unchecked if you do not want that AI exclusion request. Squarespace says the starting choice is unchecked because excluding the site from chat answers and sources could affect traffic. That describes the reason for its choice, without promising visits or citations for your site.

The guide says a checkbox change updates robots.txt. It also says this does not remove material already scraped for training. Judge your edit by the current public request it adds. A prior copy held elsewhere is outside what this setting changes. If the aim is to control only a few pages, the guide says that option is currently unavailable.

Check both the request and the response

Squarespace crawler settings says: Read robots.txt at the root of the Squarespace domain. Find the five listed names and inspect the rules under each. Do the same for PerplexityBot without assuming it appears. A file check lets you compare the control description with the text actually served. Then request the same public page using the browser and named headers below.

An HTTP response is a separate observation from an exclusion request in the file. Squarespace says friendly crawlers have offered to read and obey robots.txt, while malicious crawlers may still misuse content. A page that responds successfully to curl can therefore still carry your request that a listed bot stay out. Save the response and the file when you ask support about an unexpected result.

curl -sS -L https://example.com/robots.txt
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'Mozilla/5.0' https://example.com/
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'GPTBot' https://example.com/
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'ClaudeBot' https://example.com/
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'PerplexityBot' https://example.com/
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'Google-Extended' https://example.com/
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'Applebot-Extended' https://example.com/
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null -A 'CCBot' https://example.com/