Can AI crawlers read bbc.co.uk?
AI crawlers can read some of this site. The fixes below close the gaps. 9 of 20 checks failed.
Scored 62/100 on 2026-10-14 from https://www.bbc.co.uk/
What an AI crawler gets
The first 400 characters of text in the HTML, before any JavaScript runs.
BBC - Home BBC Homepage Skip to content Accessibility Help Your account Home News Sport Earth Reel Worklife Travel Culture Future Music TV Weather Sounds More menu More menu Search BBC Home News Sport Earth Reel Worklife Travel Culture Future Music TV Weather Sounds Close menu Welcome to the BBC BBC Homepage News headlines Russell Brand was a 'sexual predator', says prosecution as rape t...
13,111 characters of readable text
Which AI crawlers are allowed
| Crawler | robots.txt says |
|---|---|
| GPTBot | Blocked |
| OAI-SearchBot | Blocked |
| ClaudeBot | Blocked |
| Claude-SearchBot | Allowed |
| PerplexityBot | Blocked |
| Perplexity-User | Blocked |
| Google-Extended | Blocked |
| CCBot | Blocked |
| Bytespider | Blocked |
| Amazonbot | Blocked |
Score by category
Fixes, biggest first
Let GPTBot crawl the site
Your robots.txt blocks OpenAI's crawler, so ChatGPT learns about you only from other sites.
Let ClaudeBot crawl the site
Your robots.txt blocks Anthropic's crawler, so Claude learns about you only from other sites.
Let PerplexityBot crawl the site
Your robots.txt blocks Perplexity's crawler, so it can't cite your pages in answers.
Add real copy to the page
Readable text is a tiny share of the page's code, or there's very little of it. Crawlers summarise words, not markup.
Describe your organisation in JSON-LD
Organization or WebSite objects tie your site to a known entity, so answers name you correctly.
Keep sitemap dates fresh
No lastmod date in the last 90 days, so crawlers can't tell what changed and may not come back.
Offer a machine-readable interface
A valid /openapi.json or /llms-full.txt lets AI agents use your product or read your docs in full, not just your homepage.
Add an llms.txt file
A short Markdown summary of your site at /llms.txt. Cheap to add, but few AI systems request it yet, so it's worth 3 points.
Mirror llms.txt at /.well-known/llms.txt
Some tools look in the .well-known folder instead. A copy of the same file covers both.
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11 checks passed
- Publish a robots.txt file (4 points)
- Put your words in the HTML (18 points)
- Stop serving an empty app shell (10 points)
- Give the page an h1 heading (4 points)
- Use semantic HTML tags (4 points)
- Add structured data (JSON-LD) (6 points)
- Write a descriptive page title (3 points)
- Add a meta description (3 points)
- Add Open Graph tags (2 points)
- Add a canonical link (2 points)
- Publish a sitemap.xml (6 points)