Blocking Doesn't Keep You Out: 67% of Websites That Block GPTBot Still Get Cited by ChatGPT

    67% of frequently cited websites that block GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler, still appear as sources in ChatGPT answers, close to the 73% of all frequently cited websites. Blocking GPTBot trims a site's ChatGPT citations; it does not remove the site from ChatGPT.

    Cited by ChatGPT by group of frequently cited websites
    All frequently cited websites
    73%
    Block GPTBot
    67%
    Allow GPTBot
    75%
    Block OAI-SearchBot or ChatGPT-User
    70%

    Source: Suff Digital analysis of 813 frequently cited websites and 222,157 citations · answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features, Google search results and the public HTTP Archive crawl, September 2026

    Block at least one AI crawler
    Websites
    250
    Average citations per website
    330
    Median citations per website
    133

    Source: Suff Digital analysis of 813 frequently cited websites and 222,157 citations · answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features, Google search results and the public HTTP Archive crawl, September 2026

    Source: Blocking Doesn't Keep You Out: 67% of Websites That Block GPTBot Still Get Cited by ChatGPT - Suff Digital