User-agent: *
# Content Signals (contentsignals.org / AIPREF draft) — we are an AI-visibility company: we WELCOME
# AI training, grounding (ai-input) and search use of our public content.
Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=yes
Allow: /

# AI search & training crawlers — explicitly welcomed, and named so an audit sees deliberate coverage.
# Cloudflare's managed robots.txt is off for this zone, so this file is served exactly as written (checked
# 15 Sep 2026, as a browser and as GPTBot). If that block were ever switched on, these Allow groups would
# still win for equal-specificity rules.
# The guide to this site for language models: https://therankingfactory.com/llms.txt
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /
# The user-initiated and search-indexing agents, named alongside the training crawler the way OpenAI's
# already were (12 Sep 2026). Coverage was asymmetric: ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot were listed while
# their Anthropic and Perplexity equivalents were not, and a user-initiated fetch is the one that answers
# a live question about us. Allowing an agent that never calls costs nothing.
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Allow: /
User-agent: Amazonbot
Allow: /
User-agent: cohere-ai
Allow: /
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /

# Search + AI-Overview crawlers — explicit coverage (these power Google Search / AI Overviews and
# Bing / Copilot). Already allowed by the wildcard above; named here so audits see full, deliberate
# coverage and there is no ambiguity.
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
# Training crawler (consistent with ai-train=yes above)
User-agent: Bytespider
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://therankingfactory.com/sitemap.xml