A 200 Response Does Not Prove an AI Crawler Can Read Your Site

A 200 OK on the homepage does not prove an AI crawler can read or index the site.

Access can still fail because of robots.txt, CDN/WAF rules, Cloudflare challenges, soft blocks, or canonical/metadata issues.

The article recommends testing with multiple crawler identities and checking both transport and content signals.

The goal is to identify the exact gate that failed instead of relying on status code alone.