ChatGPT Still Cites URLs Even After Being Blocked

lilyraynyc · x · 2026-07-17

This post highlights an interesting phenomenon: while the author is actively trying to block OpenAI's crawlers, ChatGPT still frequently performs site: searches to find the site's "official content" and includes those URLs in its citations.

As a result, even though ChatGPT cannot directly access the page content, the site still receives referral traffic from ChatGPT. The author speculates that ChatGPT might be combining its training data with information from other sources to generate answers, rather than relying on real-time crawling of the blocked pages.

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