Block unwanted bots, including AI crawlers.

Bot Blocker

Helps you manage which bots can crawl your site with simple toggle controls – no coding needed.

*Not available on multisite WordPress installations.

Yoast SEO Bot Blocker blocking specific crawlers like AI Bots from crawling a website

Not all bots are helpful

Your site attracts all kinds of bots, some helpful, some not. While search engines use bots to help people find your content, bots like GPTBot, CCBot, and Google-Extended are used to train large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini. Others crawl your site or hammer it without providing value.

Bot Blocker puts you in control:

Decide what gets accessed – and what doesn’t

Block bots used to train AI

Reduces unnecessary server load from unwanted bots

control what crawls your website

What is Yoast SEO Bot Blocker?

Bot Blocker gives you a clean, user-friendly way to manage bot access to your site. Instead of editing technical files, you get an easy interface to block unwanted bots with just a toggle. It works by updating your site’s robots.txt file behind the scenes.

No need to know how to edit code or configure files manually
Avoid complex tasks like optimizing crawler user-agent strings
It’s all automated, no space for mistakes

Just toggle and save. We take care of the rest. Here is how to activate Yoast SEO Bot Blocker.

Robot.txt with blocked bots including AI Bots

Yoast SEO helps you block unwanted bots – automatically

With Yoast SEO Premium, Bot Blocker is ready to use right away. There’s no technical or manual setup needed. This feature:

Lets you block bots like GPTBot, CCBot, and Google-Extended with a single click
Reduces the risk of your content being used to train AI models without permission
Better control of your server load generated from bots
Updates your robots.txt automatically, no code is required
Helps protect sensitive or proprietary content

Who should use Bot Blocker?

This feature is especially helpful if your site has:

Original articles, guides, or educational content:
- Great content is valuable – and vulnerable. Prevent responsible AI bots from using your content in model training by adding clear restrictions via robots.txt.
Confidential or proprietary information
- Some content just isn’t meant to be public. Reduce access to specific bots by explicitly disallowing them in your robots.txt, useful for sites handling sensitive or controlled content.
Large amounts of crawlable pages
- When your site grows, so does the risk of being targeted by non-compliant bots. Agencies and site managers can use Bot Blocker to manage access at scale with minimal effort.

Ready to get started?

Activating your Bot Blocker is easy. If you already have Yoast SEO Premium, just follow the instructions in this article.