xAI · Other AI bots
Grok
A short Grok user-agent token. Short tokens are easy to miss in robots.txt because they do not look like GPTBot.
- Operator
- xAI
- Traffic type
- Other AI bots
- Verification
- Not independently verifiable
- robots.txt
- Compliance not documented
Usually means: Link-preview, ads, and product fetchers. Allow them if you want unfurls and landing-page fetches to work; they are not the citation path.
User-agent
robots.txt and most WAF rules match the token, not the full Mozilla string. Operators often wrap Grok in extra product or version text.
Grok
What Grok does
Some Grok fetches identify simply as Grok. A robots group for GPTBot will not match it.
How to get discovered
If logs show User-agent: Grok, add that exact group. Prefer allowing the whole xAI family you actually observe.
Why Grok might skip you
Rules written only for verbose Mozilla-compatible UAs, or AI-bot packs that omit Grok.
robots.txt rule
Allow this token on public pages you want retrieved or cited. A CDN “Block AI bots” toggle can still 403 it after robots.txt says Allow.
# Keep Grok eligible to fetch this site
User-agent: Grok
Allow: /xAI has not published a machine-readable range file for this token. Do not treat the user-agent alone as proof of identity.
JavaScript: reads raw HTML only.
Other xAI bots
Training, search, and user-fetch tokens from the same operator are not interchangeable. Allow the discovery path even when you opt out of training.
Grok FAQ
What is Grok?
Some Grok fetches identify simply as Grok. A robots group for GPTBot will not match it.
Should I allow Grok in robots.txt?
Yes if you want xAI to be able to fetch and cite this site. Blocking Grok is how pages stay invisible to that product even when Googlebot still crawls them.
How do I know a request is really Grok?
xAI has not published a range file for this token. Treat the user-agent as a claimed identity, and do not build a hard IP allowlist from blog posts or screenshots.
Letting Grok in is the start. Getting cited is the job.
Rankealo checks whether AI crawlers can reach you, then publishes pages built to be retrieved and quoted in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
