These bots behave much like search engine crawlers. They request pages, follow links and respect robots.txt rules written for their user agent. The distinction worth knowing is purpose. Some fetch content to train future models, some fetch it live to answer a question right now, and a few companies run separate bots for each job. Google also offers a Google-Extended control that affects AI training use without changing normal Search crawling. Blocking a bot in robots.txt is a request, generally honored by the major providers, and you can allow some while blocking others.
Most service businesses should let these crawlers in. If you block the bots that fetch pages to answer live questions, you remove yourself from the answers where your competitors appear. Publishers who sell content have a real reason to restrict training crawlers, but a plumbing company does not lose anything by being quoted. Check your robots.txt for blanket disallow rules that a developer or a security plugin may have added, since an accidental block is common and quietly keeps you out of AI results entirely.
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