{"paper":{"title":"Do Generative AI Assistants Respect robots.txt? Tracing Web Access Beyond Visible Answers","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CY","authors_text":"David Rodriguez, Gabriel Lopez-Fonseca, Jose M. del Alamo, Stefan Bechtold","submitted_at":"2026-07-16T00:45:06Z","abstract_excerpt":"AI assistants increasingly retrieve web content at inference time to provide fresh and grounded answers, yet it remains unclear whether these search-augmented capabilities respect website-owner restrictions expressed through robots.txt. We present a controlled empirical study of ten widely used AI assistants with advertised web-search capabilities. For each assistant, we first identify a configuration that actually produces observable web-browsing behavior and record the user-agent exposed during retrieval. We then evaluate compliance with controlled robots.txt rules across four complementary "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.14447","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.14447/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}