The decision to block AI crawlers from your Canadian website depends on your business model. The crawlers in question include OpenAI's GPTBot (ChatGPT training), Google-Extended (Bard/Gemini training), CCBot (Common Crawl, used by many AI training datasets), Anthropic's anthropic-ai and ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Bingbot's AI-specific user agents. Each can be allowed or disallowed independently via robots.txt. Blocking AI crawlers reduces three things: (1) the likelihood your content informs LLM training data (and thus appears in LLM-generated answers in the future); (2) your visibility in AI answer engines that use real-time retrieval (Perplexity, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT search) — these crawlers fetch your pages live to compose answers, and blocking them removes you from consideration; (3) your eligibility for citation in AI-generated answer surfaces. For most Canadian SMBs and B2B companies, AI-mediated discovery is increasingly important — LLM users asking 'best Ottawa SEO agency' or 'how do I optimize for AI Overviews' are high-intent buyers, and being citable in those answers drives meaningful brand awareness and lead generation. Blocking AI crawlers cuts you out of this growing channel. The standard recommendation: allow AI crawlers and optimize for AI citation patterns. The cases where blocking makes sense: large content publishers (news sites, magazines, paywalled content) whose business model depends on direct site visits for ad revenue or subscriptions; original research producers who want to control how their data is referenced; and businesses with content that may be misused if extracted out of context (e.g., specific medical or legal advice that requires the full context to be safe). For Canadian businesses choosing partial blocking, the most common pattern is: allow Google-Extended, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot (the citation-generating crawlers); disallow CCBot (which feeds many open training datasets without citation back); and use the robots noai meta tag on specific pages where extraction would be inappropriate. The future-state consideration: AI-mediated discovery is on a clear growth trajectory. Decisions to block AI crawlers in 2026 will compound — content not in AI training datasets today will not be cited in AI answers tomorrow even if you reverse the block. Make the decision deliberately rather than reactively.