Should I block AI crawlers like GPTBot in my robots.txt?

No, not if you want to be recommended. Blocking GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, or Google-Extended removes your site from the pool of sources those tools can read and cite, which is the opposite of what a local contractor needs. Publishers with paywalled content have a reason to block; a plumber trying to get named in Tampa does not.

Check your robots.txt for these agents, since some site builders and security plugins add blocks by default without telling you. Also confirm your key service pages are not set to noindex and that your content is in real HTML rather than rendered only by JavaScript, because a crawler that cannot read the page cannot quote it.

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