Brands That Block GPTBot Still Get Named by ChatGPT: 31.5 Mentions vs 20.7 for Brands That Allow It

    Brands that block GPTBot, the bot OpenAI uses to collect web pages, are named in 31.5 ChatGPT answers on average, against 20.7 for brands that allow it, 52% more. Blocking OpenAI does not take a brand out of ChatGPT's answers; it goes with fewer links to the brand's own pages.

    Never named in any AI answer by group
    Brands that block any AI bot
    23%
    Brands that allow all AI bots
    33%

    Source: Suff Digital analysis of 468 brands and 813 frequently cited websites · answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features, and robots.txt files from the public HTTP Archive, September 2026

    Brands blocking it by AI bot
    Any AI bot
    105
    GPTBot (OpenAI)
    79
    CCBot (Common Crawl)
    66
    Anthropic's bots
    65
    Google-Extended
    51
    PerplexityBot
    50
    OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)
    49

    Source: Suff Digital analysis of 468 brands and 813 frequently cited websites · answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features, and robots.txt files from the public HTTP Archive, September 2026

    Source: Brands That Block GPTBot Still Get Named by ChatGPT: 31.5 Mentions vs 20.7 for Brands That Allow It - Suff Digital