Vercel Firewall can block AI crawlers and assistants separately
The AI Bots managed ruleset now splits crawlers from assistants, so you can block one for training while still letting the other fetch pages for users.
Vercel updated its Firewall’s AI Bots managed ruleset on 29 October to treat AI crawlers and AI assistants as two separate categories, each with its own log or block action.
AI crawlers are bots that gather content for indexing and model training. AI assistants are bots that fetch a page in response to something a user actually asked, such as a chat tool answering a question with a live lookup. You set an action for each from Security > Firewall > Rules in the dashboard, or from the CLI:
vercel firewall diff
vercel firewall publishThe ruleset is available on every plan, and Vercel says it will keep adding new bots to it as they appear.
Why it matters: blocking “AI bots” used to be all or nothing. Splitting the two means a site can opt out of being used as training data while still letting an assistant fetch a page to answer a user’s question, which is the difference between losing content to a model and showing up in an answer. Worth revisiting your bot rules if you set them up before this split existed.