The firm's own record behind the field note: the 2026-08-20 finding on jiashley.com, the Cloudflare zone settings before and after the fix, the audit tool's robots.txt checks across the firm's properties and one prospect, and the live robots.txt as served on the day this file was built.
Fields
field
value
study
cdn-blocking-ai-crawlers
finding_2026_08_20
field
value
site
jiashley.com
recorded_in
phaneia/FINDINGS.md, entry '2026-08-20 — Cloudflare was silently blocking AI crawlers on jiashley.com'
origin_robots_txt_policy
AI crawlers welcome
audit_before_fix
WARN, 3 AI bots blocked (recorded in the finding; the pre-fix JSON was not kept)
audit_after_fix
PASS, AI bots blocked: none (jiashley.com_2026-08-20.json)
record_quote
The zone had `ai_bots_protection = block` plus Cloudflare's managed robots.txt enabled. Net effect: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Amazonbot, and Applebot-Extended were all disallowed AND blocked at the network edge. The origin robots.txt said "AI crawlers welcome"; the edge said the opposite, and the edge wins.