Otterburn Park, QUEBEC, Oct. 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Seven in ten Canadian news websites now ask AI crawlers to stay out, while not one of the country's banks, insurers or fintechs does, according to a new study from Chateau Mojo, a Quebec-based SEO and AI search consultancy. The study examined the robots.txt files of 388 of Canada's best-known websites on October 17, 2026, covering news, banking, government, retail, telecom, education and five other sectors.
Chateau Mojo's October 2026 study of AI crawler rules across 388 Canadian websites.
Robots.txt is the public file a website uses to tell automated crawlers what they may read. Of the 372 files that could be read, 21% block at least one AI crawler from the entire site. That average hides a sharp divide: 65 of 93 news sites (70%) block AI crawlers, compared with 5% of sites in every other sector combined.
Key findings include:
- French-language newsrooms block the most. 86% of French-language news sites block at least one AI crawler, and 82% block the most widely used AI training crawler, compared with 39% of English-language outlets.
- Banks and governments are wide open. None of the 29 banks, insurers and fintechs in the study blocks an AI crawler, and 60 of 63 federal, provincial and municipal sites block none. One provincial government, which blocks 11 AI crawlers, is the clearest exception.
- Media owners chose different strategies. One Quebec media group blocks AI training crawlers but leaves AI search open, one national newspaper chain points 19 papers to a machine-readable content licence, and two major broadcasters block no AI crawlers at all.
- Some rules are out of date. Nine sites, several of them major broadcast newsrooms, block crawler names that the AI company behind them no longer lists, while leaving its current crawler without a rule.
- The home team gets no pass. 16 sites block the crawler of a Canadian AI developer that received a $240 million federal funding commitment in 2024, including several of the country's largest national newsrooms.
"When most of Canada's journalism asks AI to stay out while banks, retailers and governments let it in, what AI tools can freshly read about the country tilts toward the people selling something," said Jeremy McWilliams, founder of Chateau Mojo. "Blocking can make sense for publishers, because their words are the product. Most other businesses want to be found, and an AI assistant can't recommend a company whose website it isn't allowed to read. Plenty of sites are shutting AI out by accident through old templates and firewall settings."
The study counts a crawler as blocked only when it is barred from a site's entire domain. It reflects what sites ask crawlers to do rather than what crawlers actually do, and it does not capture blocking done at the network level. The full dataset, which names every site and every crawler, is free to use with credit to Chateau Mojo.
The complete study, methodology and downloadable data are available at chateaumojo.com/blog/canada-ai-crawler-study. Journalists can request the raw robots.txt files or a custom cut of the data through the study page.
About Chateau Mojo
Chateau Mojo is a Canadian SEO and AI search consultancy led by founder Jeremy McWilliams. I help brands get found in Google and in AI answers from ChatGPT and Perplexity. The work covers technical SEO, content strategy, and AI visibility, mainly for supplements, health and wellness, B2B, ecommerce, industrial, and SaaS companies.
Press Inquiries
Jeremy McWilliams
jeremy [at] chateaumojo.com
https://chateaumojo.com/
