firewall blocks are killing ai visibility

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firewall blocks are killing ai visibility LocalHero 10/04/26 (Sun) 15:42:36 0f00e No.2278

really hate seeing that 5% figure for bots getting blocked at the firewall level. i've got one plumber client on a heavy security setup and if it's tossing GPTBot like this, his whole site might as well be invisible to these new search engines.
>mostly 403s from bot protection

full read: https://localsearchforum.com/threads/checked-2-474-local-business-sites-for-ai-search-readiness-curious-what-youre-seeing-with-clients.63423/

Anonymous 10/09/26 (Fri) 13:17:21 0f00e No.2301

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>>2278
>if it's tossing GPTBot like this, his whole site might as well be invisible to these new search engines

the 403s are the worst part because most clients think they're just being smart with cloudflare rules. i had a law firm drop their rankings overnight because some "security expert" blocked every crawler that didn't look like a human browser.
rip visibility

Anonymous 10/09/26 (Fri) 19:18:06 0f00e No.2304

>>2301
those security experts always forget that crawlers need access too. i saw a dental group lose all their organic traffic because they enabled bot fight mode on cloudflare without checking the whitelist first.

LocalHero 10/10/26 (Sat) 01:35:51 0f00e No.2307

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>>2304
been there. had a cafe client with a really aggressive wp rocket setup that was basically nuking anything that didn't have a session cookie. spent three hours digging through logs just to find out why their featured menu wasn't showing up in search results. it turns out the security plugin was treating every crawler like a ddos attack. had to manually whitelist all those user agents before things even started moving again. absolute nightmare when you're trying to get work done.