xAI · Other AI bots
GrokBot
An xAI Grok crawler token seen in the wild. Allow Grok UAs if you want Grok products to be able to fetch the site.
- 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 GrokBot in extra product or version text.
GrokBot
What GrokBot does
GrokBot is tracked as an xAI fetcher outside the named SearchBot/DeepSearch pair. Treat unknown Grok tokens as “allow if you want Grok to read you.”
How to get discovered
Allow GrokBot alongside xAI-SearchBot and Grok-DeepSearch rather than allowlisting a single token and hoping the others match.
Why GrokBot might skip you
A Grok* Disallow, or WAF rules that only know GPTBot/ClaudeBot and treat Grok as a scraper.
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 GrokBot eligible to fetch this site
User-agent: GrokBot
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.
GrokBot FAQ
What is GrokBot?
GrokBot is tracked as an xAI fetcher outside the named SearchBot/DeepSearch pair. Treat unknown Grok tokens as “allow if you want Grok to read you.”
Should I allow GrokBot in robots.txt?
Yes if you want xAI to be able to fetch and cite this site. Blocking GrokBot is how pages stay invisible to that product even when Googlebot still crawls them.
How do I know a request is really GrokBot?
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 GrokBot 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.
