What does the edge / CDN bot-handling check look for?
It looks at whether your infrastructure layer permits the AI crawlers you want, separate from what your robots.txt says. Specifically:
- AI crawler access — whether bots like GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended appear to be allowed through.
- Edge / WAF blocking — whether CDN bot-management or firewall rules are challenging or blocking these crawlers.
- Consistency with intent — whether the edge behaviour matches your robots.txt and your goal of being AI-visible.
AI crawlers allowed at the edge passes; some friction or partial blocking is a warning; AI crawlers blocked before reaching the site is a fail.
How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?
GEObubbly probes how your edge or CDN responds to AI-crawler user-agents. It's a core, scored Infrastructure check that runs server-side, since edge behaviour is observed from the live responses.
Criteria: Pass — AI UAs get a normal 200. Warning — some challenged or throttled. Fail — edge returns 403 / challenge to AI crawlers.
Why edge/CDN AI-bot handling matters for GEO
There's a layer in front of your site — your CDN, edge network or web application firewall (WAF) — that decides which requests even reach your origin, and its bot-management rules operate independently of your robots.txt. This is a uniquely GEO-relevant trap: you can do everything right on-page and in robots.txt, yet still be invisible to AI engines if your edge is blocking their crawlers. Many bot-management products treat unfamiliar or non-search crawlers as unwanted scraping by default, so AI crawlers like GPTBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended can be silently challenged or blocked at the edge before they ever see your content. The result is that your pages never get crawled by the engines you want to be cited by — a silent, easy-to-miss exclusion from AI search. The fix is to review your CDN/WAF bot rules and explicitly allow the AI crawlers you want, while still blocking genuinely abusive traffic. This is a deliberate business decision — some sites choose to block AI crawlers — but it should be a choice, not an accidental default.