The Ad Tech Crawlers You Should Never Block: A Publisher's Guide to Friendly Bots

Why Your AI Blocking Strategy Might Be Costing You Money

The conversation around AI crawlers has publishers reaching for the block button. Training bots scrape your content to build models that compete with you for audience attention. The instinct to shut everything out makes sense.

Here's the problem: in the rush to block AI training crawlers, many publishers accidentally block the bots that actually help them make money. Ad tech crawlers exist to categorize your content, verify brand safety, and enable the contextual targeting that drives higher CPMs.

A recent comment on an industry forum put it perfectly: "Speaking from the buy-side, we're starting to care a lot more about contextual targeting, so publishers should be careful not to block friendly crawlers that are trying to index content so we know to bid on your inventory."

That's a media buyer telling you directly that your blocking strategy affects their willingness to spend.

Read our guide on AI Crawlers.

What Makes a Crawler "Friendly" to Publishers

The distinction between helpful and harmful crawlers comes down to one question: does this bot contribute to your revenue or take from your content without compensation?

Ad tech crawlers fall squarely in the helpful category. These bots analyze your pages to enable several revenue-critical functions.

• Contextual Intelligence: These crawlers read your content to understand topics, sentiment, and applicable categories. Advertisers use this data to target campaigns to relevant content. Without contextual crawlers indexing your pages, these matches cannot happen.
• Brand Safety Verification: Before spending money, advertisers want assurance their ads won't appear next to problematic content. If verification bots cannot access your site, buyers may exclude you from campaigns entirely.
• Fraud Detection: Verification providers use crawlers to identify suspicious patterns and protect the supply chain. Blocking these tools can actually increase your IVT scores by preventing the detection that keeps your inventory clean.

The Complete Ad Tech Crawler Allow List

Publishers need to explicitly allow these crawlers in their robots.txt files and server configurations. The following table provides the essential user agents to permit.

Beyond user agents, some verification providers operate from specific IP ranges that you may need to allow at the firewall level. DoubleVerify, for example, publishes a list of IP addresses that publishers should whitelist to ensure their verification tools function properly.

How Blocking These Crawlers Impacts Your Revenue

The relationship between crawler access and ad revenue is direct. When contextual crawlers cannot index your content, several negative outcomes follow.

• Reduced bid density: Advertisers using contextual targeting cannot bid on your inventory if their targeting providers have no data about your pages. Fewer bidders means lower CPMs.
• Exclusion from premium campaigns: Brand advertisers with strict safety requirements will exclude inventory they cannot verify. If DoubleVerify or IAS cannot scan your pages, their clients cannot buy your inventory.
• Lower quality scores: DSPs and SSPs use verification data to score inventory quality. Publishers with inaccessible pages may receive lower quality scores, affecting their position in auctions.

Visit the AI Blocking resource center.

The Difference Between Ad Tech Crawlers and AI Training Bots

Publishers sometimes conflate all automated traffic into a single "bot" category. Ad tech crawlers and AI training bots serve fundamentally different purposes.

The key insight: ad tech crawlers exist because advertisers pay for the services they enable. These crawlers are part of your monetization infrastructure, not parasites on your content.

Implementing a Selective Blocking Strategy

Smart publishers implement nuanced bot management rather than blanket blocking. Your robots.txt file should explicitly allow ad tech crawlers even if you're blocking AI training bots.

# Block AI training crawlers
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
 
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
 
# Allow ad tech crawlers
User-agent: DoubleVerifyBot
Allow: /
 
User-agent: IAS_crawler
Allow: /
 
User-agent: Peer39_crawler
Allow: /

Server-level configurations require similar attention. If you're using Cloudflare's AI bot blocking feature, verify that your rules don't inadvertently catch ad tech crawlers. Firewall rules should whitelist known IP ranges for verification providers like DoubleVerify and IAS.

The Growing Importance of Contextual Targeting

The deprecation of third-party cookies has elevated contextual targeting from a backup option to a primary strategy. Advertisers who previously relied on audience data are shifting spend toward contextual solutions that don't depend on user tracking.

This shift makes contextual crawlers more valuable than ever. When a brand safety provider like IAS scans your site, your articles get classified into IAB categories, sentiment gets assessed, pages receive safety ratings, and specific keywords get indexed for targeting.

All of this data feeds into the programmatic ecosystem. DSPs use it to help advertisers find relevant inventory. SSPs use it to package and price your inventory appropriately. Without crawler access, none of this intelligence exists, and your inventory becomes a black box that buyers avoid.

Common Mistakes Publishers Make

Several patterns consistently hurt publishers who are trying to manage bot traffic responsibly.

• Blanket blocking: Using overly broad rules that catch ad tech crawlers along with AI training bots. The convenience of one-click solutions creates collateral damage.
• Ignoring firewall interactions: Robots.txt only works for bots that check it. Server-level protections and CDN rules can block traffic before robots.txt is ever consulted.
• Static configurations: The ad tech crawler landscape evolves. New user agents appear, IP ranges change, and providers merge or rebrand. Annual reviews are insufficient.

The Buy-Side Perspective

Media buyers increasingly rely on contextual and verification data to make purchasing decisions. Buyers use contextual data to build inclusion lists of inventory that matches their campaign goals. Without contextual crawlers indexing your content, your coverage never appears in their targeting options.

Brand safety requirements have also tightened significantly. Major advertisers require verification across 100% of their programmatic spend. Inventory that cannot be verified gets excluded automatically, regardless of how safe it actually is.

The combination of contextual targeting and verification creates a gating function. Publishers who enable these crawlers participate in more auctions and access more demand. Publishers who block them face a shrinking pool of potential buyers.

Protecting Revenue While Controlling AI Access

The optimal strategy separates AI training crawlers from ad tech crawlers and treats each category appropriately. This nuanced approach protects your content from unauthorized AI training while preserving the crawler access that drives ad revenue.

Your implementation should include explicit allow rules for ad tech crawlers, block rules targeting specific training crawlers rather than broad categories, firewall whitelisting for known IP ranges, regular log auditing, and ongoing maintenance as the landscape evolves.

The goal is precision, not convenience. Broad blocking sacrifices revenue for simplicity. Targeted blocking requires more configuration effort but preserves the crawler access that supports your monetization.

Amplify Your Revenue with the Right Partner

Managing crawler access is just one piece of the ad revenue puzzle. Publishers who optimize their bot configurations still need sophisticated yield management to maximize the value of their accessible inventory.

Playwire's RAMP Platform handles the complexity of programmatic optimization so you can focus on content. Our machine learning technology analyzes millions of data points to maximize CPMs across all your inventory. Combined with proper crawler management, this creates a revenue stack that captures full value from your traffic.

Ready to ensure your technical configurations support maximum revenue? Apply now to learn how Playwire can help you capture the full value of your traffic.