Vercel separates crawler blocking from assistant retrieval

Vercel Firewall now lets site operators log or block AI crawlers separately from AI assistants. Crawlers collect pages for indexing or training; assistants fetch pages in response to a user action or query. The managed ruleset can therefore block one category while permitting the other, and Vercel maintains its bot definitions as new bots are added.

Vercel · Oct 29, 2026

Why it matters

Operators can express different policies for bulk collection and user-requested retrieval without one blanket AI-bot setting.

More context

The October 29 update is available on all plans. Configure the AI Bots categories under the project firewall, review the proposed changes and publish them. Start with logging to inspect how actual requests are classified.

Keep in mind

The announcement does not quantify identification accuracy or promise coverage of every bot. These controls depend on the managed classification and do not guarantee that allowed retrieval will bring readers or referrals.

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