The Hosting Providers Blocking Your AI Visibility

While digging through Cloudflare settings last week, I found a parameter that was preventing a site from showing up in ChatGPT. Sharing that simple finding triggered an avalanche of direct messages from people dealing with the same problem, just not on Cloudflare.

AI visibility is the defining topic right now, meaning it’s simply unacceptable that hosting providers block AI bots without clearly informing their users, or without giving them any way to fix it themselves.

Here is the list of hosting providers penalizing you, with or without the option to turn the blocks off.

Group 1: Confirmed

The hardest part is being certain the block actually affects all users of a given hosting provider. Some don’t hide it. Starting with the most obvious one.

Cloudflare

You saw this coming. Cloudflare was the first service to publicly call out AI bots for their aggressive crawl rates and the bandwidth costs that come with it.

They’ve been blocking these bots by default since July 2025, and they do give you the option to lift the block (source). Disable the “Block AI training bots” and “Manage your robots.txt” options, and you’re good.

WP Engine

An increasingly documented case, and a well-hidden one. WP Engine blocks AI bots without asking, and there’s no setting you can change to fix it (source).

Your options:

• Contact them and ask for an exception
• Switch hosting providers

Given WP Engine’s scale, hosting 1.5 million WordPress sites, the impact is significant.

SiteGround

More transparent than WP Engine, SiteGround draws a line between training bots (blocked) and bots triggered by user actions (apparently allowed through) (source).

The details SiteGround provides are vague, but this feels like a more reasonable compromise than WP Engine. However, there’s no way to disable the block. Take it or leave it.

Kinsta

Kinsta’s Bot Protection is opt-in, meaning you only get it once you’ve given your consent (source).

You can then choose between different protection levels and stay in control of what gets blocked and what doesn’t.

Their CTO confirmed in March 2026 that AI bots will not be blocked at the platform level, and that the bandwidth they use won’t be billed. No issues here.

Pressable

As stated in their documentation, Pressable doesn’t block AI bots themselves and leaves it up to users to configure their own robots.txt. Clean approach.

Pantheon

No blocking of any kind at Pantheon, as explained in their docs. Nothing to worry about.

Group 2: Suspected but Unconfirmed

Other providers have generated a lot of discussion and user reports. However, nothing official yet, so take this with a grain of salt.

O2Switch

A lot of complaints from customers (mine included) about a possible AI bot block from O2Switch.

Several tweets (like this one from Sylvain Laneyrie) report that Claude’s training bot was blocked, but the block was apparently lifted after contacting support.

Their behavior on this is still pretty unclear to me. Not exactly reassuring.

Hostinger

Again, informal reports and strong suspicions that Hostinger is serving bot verification pages, blocking legitimate crawlers. This happens at the infrastructure level, meaning it’s out of your hands.

Worse: contacting support apparently only led to confirmation that certain subscription tiers could influence this behavior (source). Nothing official, but it’s concerning.

Group 3: Still a Mystery

Some providers, despite their size, are essentially ghosts on this topic.

OVH

No documentation, a few conversations about AI bots crawling heavily. That’s about it. OVH probably isn’t blocking anything, but it’s not confirmed.

Ionos

Same situation: barely any noise on the topic, no support documentation to speak of.

Infomaniak

Nothing precise, aside from a mention of .htaccess for bot blocking.

Gandi

No official documentation, no bot filtering of any kind reported at Gandi. Most likely no interference with AI bots, but that’s speculation.

LWS

No discussion on the topic, no official or unofficial details about their AI bot practices.

What to Do If Your Host Isn’t Playing Fair

Just found out your hosting provider is limiting your AI visibility? Here are your options:

• Add a CDN to your site (like Cloudflare), so content is served to AI bots through an intermediary
• Switch hosting providers

Simple and effective.

If you’re a hosting provider and find any inaccurate information here, feel free to send me a note with the official documentation, and I’ll update this accordingly.