{
  "slug": "ai-blocking-myth-calgary-2026",
  "generated_at": "2026-07-21T05:23:15.882Z",
  "corpus_size": 403,
  "sample_frame": "Calgary businesses that appear in curated \"best of Calgary [industry]\" listicles and own an outbound-linkable website",
  "verticals": "restaurants, gyms, cafes, contractors (incl. construction/renovation/electricians), dental, med-spa, law, auto, mortgage brokers (real-estate substitute), retail",
  "verticals_note": "Real estate is represented by mortgage brokers because no Calgary realtor/brokerage listicle links out to independent websites; every ranker uses internal profile pages.",
  "excluded_hosts": "30+ hosts and aggregators removed from the frame (listicle hosts, pay-to-play directories, WordPress infrastructure, Google shorteners).",
  "data_collected": "2026-07-21",
  "method": "Fetched /robots.txt for each corpus site (5 hop redirect limit, 12s timeout, 500KB max) and parsed per RFC 9309. For each of the AI crawler tokens listed in the current documentation of each operator on 2026-07-20, recorded whether the site returned Disallow: / for that token (or matched a wildcard block).",
  "tokens_measured": [
    "GPTBot",
    "OAI-SearchBot",
    "ChatGPT-User",
    "ClaudeBot",
    "Claude-User",
    "Claude-SearchBot",
    "PerplexityBot",
    "Perplexity-User",
    "Google-Extended",
    "CCBot",
    "Applebot",
    "Applebot-Extended",
    "meta-externalagent",
    "meta-webindexer",
    "meta-externalfetcher",
    "Amazonbot",
    "Amzn-SearchBot",
    "MistralAI-User",
    "MistralAI-Index",
    "DuckAssistBot",
    "YouBot",
    "Bytespider"
  ],
  "legacy_tokens_measured": [
    "FacebookBot",
    "anthropic-ai",
    "claude-web"
  ],
  "live_docs_verified": "2026-07-20",
  "n_reachable_robots": 333,
  "n_no_robots": 70,
  "naming_policy": "This study has no winner ranking. Every site is listed anonymized: block posture is reported without naming the business, because blocking or not blocking is a defensible business choice either way.",
  "headline": "Only 4.2% of Calgary business homepages block any AI crawler, and the few that do block the wrong bots.",
  "sample_label": "403 Calgary business homepages, robots.txt found on 333",
  "collected_label": "July 2026",
  "key_findings": [
    {
      "value": "4.2%",
      "claim": "Calgary business homepages that block any AI crawler in robots.txt"
    },
    {
      "value": "2%",
      "claim": "Block a live-retrieval bot, the kind that fetches a page to answer a question"
    },
    {
      "value": "6 sites",
      "claim": "Block every crawler by accident with a wildcard rule"
    },
    {
      "value": "70 of 403",
      "claim": "Have no robots.txt at all"
    },
    {
      "value": "2 of 2",
      "claim": "Popular blocking rules that do not do what the advice claims. GPTBot does not remove a site from ChatGPT answers and Google-Extended does not remove it from AI Overviews, according to each operator’s own documentation"
    }
  ],
  "citation": "Meridian15 (2026). The AI-Blocking Myth: 403 Calgary Sites Later, Almost No One Blocks AI (and the Ones Who Do Picked Wrong). https://fifteenthmeridian.com/blog/ai-blocking-myth-calgary-2026",
  "reuse": "Quote any figure with a link to the study URL. Method and full result table published beside it."
}