Carrd does not let you upload a robots.txt file, and that single limitation shapes your whole AI-crawler strategy. If your site lives on Carrd, you cannot block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or any other AI crawler the normal way. You have to work around it with meta tags, a CDN in front of your domain, or a move to a host you control. On a plain static HTML site the situation is the opposite: you own the server, so a robots.txt file takes five minutes. This guide covers both, starting with the Carrd workarounds that actually work.
The reason Carrd is different is architectural. Carrd is a hosted single-page site builder. You do not get file access, you do not get a server, and you cannot upload arbitrary files to your domain root. There is no robots.txt upload button and no settings panel for crawler rules. Your Carrd site serves the same page to every visitor, human or bot, and the only controls you have are the ones Carrd exposes in its settings. That is fine for a portfolio or a landing page, but it means AI crawler control needs a different route.
Option 1: Meta tags on Carrd Pro
The simplest option that works inside Carrd is meta tags. Meta tags live in the head of your page, and several AI companies respect them as training opt-outs. Two tags matter most.
The first is the noai meta tag. It tells compliant AI systems not to use the page for training. The second is noimageai, which does the same for images on the page. Together they look like this:
<meta name='robots' content='noai, noimageai'>
On a Carrd Pro plan, you can add code to your site's head through the site settings. Add the meta tag there, publish the site, and view the page source in your browser to confirm the tag is present. If you are on the free plan, this route is not available, which is one of the practical reasons to upgrade if AI training matters to you.
Be clear about what meta tags can and cannot do. They are a request, not a lock, exactly like robots.txt. The companies that document support for noai and noimageai will honor them. Companies that never agreed to the convention will ignore them. Meta tags also cannot stop a crawler from fetching your page. They only signal how the content may be used after it is fetched. If your goal is to keep a bot from ever visiting, meta tags are not enough on their own.
Our full guide to noai and noimageai meta tags lists which companies support them and how to test that they are working.
Option 2: Put Cloudflare in front of your Carrd domain
The strongest option for a Carrd site is Cloudflare. If you use a custom domain for your Carrd site, you can route that domain through Cloudflare's free plan and enforce bot rules at the edge, before the request ever reaches Carrd. This works because Cloudflare sits between the visitor and your site, and it can block a request based on the user-agent string.
Cloudflare's free plan includes a one-click control for AI crawlers. In the Cloudflare dashboard, open your domain, go to Security, then Bots, and turn on the control that blocks AI scrapers and crawlers. That single switch blocks the known AI training and scraping bots that Cloudflare tracks. It does not require any code, and it works for a Carrd site because the blocking happens at Cloudflare, not on Carrd.
If you want finer control, use a WAF custom rule instead. A custom rule can match the user-agent string against the bot names you want to block and return a 403 response. This lets you block training crawlers while allowing the answer-engine crawlers that bring you traffic, for example by blocking GPTBot and ClaudeBot but leaving OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot alone. The distinction matters: blocking the search crawlers can remove you from ChatGPT and Claude citations, while blocking only the trainers keeps your content out of model training without losing the citations.
Two things to check after setup. First, confirm your Carrd site still loads normally through Cloudflare, since you are changing your domain's DNS to point at Cloudflare. Second, test the block by requesting your site with a blocked bot's user-agent string and confirming you get a 403. Cloudflare's analytics will also show you which bots were blocked, so you can verify the rule is firing on real traffic.
Option 3: Move off Carrd to a host you control
If AI crawler control is a priority and not a nice-to-have, the honest answer is that Carrd is the wrong host. Moving a single-page site to a static host takes an afternoon and gives you full control over robots.txt, headers, and server rules. The most common destinations are Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, and GitHub Pages. All three are free for a small site, and all three serve a robots.txt file from your repository root with no extra configuration.
The move itself is straightforward. Export or rebuild your page as a single HTML file, add a robots.txt file next to it in the same folder, and deploy the folder. Your robots.txt can then block the training crawlers while keeping search and answer-engine bots welcome. Our free robots.txt generator builds the file for you, and our robots.txt template for AI crawlers is a ready starting point.
Keep your Carrd domain pointing at the new host and keep the old Carrd URL redirecting if you can. A single-page site has little SEO equity to lose in a move, but a broken link or a lost domain still costs you visitors. Test the new robots.txt at yourdomain.com/robots.txt before you announce the move anywhere.
For plain static HTML sites: the five-minute robots.txt
If your site is already plain HTML on a host you control, blocking AI crawlers is the easy version of this problem. Create a text file named robots.txt in your site's root folder, the same folder as your index.html, and add one group per crawler you want to block:
User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: / User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent Disallow: / User-agent: * Allow: /
This blocks the five biggest training crawlers while leaving everything else, including Googlebot, Bingbot, and the AI search crawlers, free to visit. If you also want to stay out of AI answers, add groups for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and DuckAssistBot. That is a separate decision, and you should make it deliberately, because blocking the search crawlers removes you from the citations that send referral traffic.
Upload the file, then open https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and confirm it loads. Test it with our free robots.txt tester to confirm each crawler group behaves the way you intended. Robots.txt is cached by crawlers, so a well-behaved bot will usually stop visiting within a day of the change.
Static sites have one more advantage: server-level rules. If your host runs nginx, a small server block can return a 403 for the same bot names, which stops even the crawlers that ignore robots.txt. Server rules are stronger than robots.txt, but they only work on a host you control, which is exactly why Carrd users cannot use them. If you run Apache, the same idea applies through server configuration rather than a robots.txt file. Either way, test carefully: a typo in a server rule can block Googlebot along with the AI bots, and that mistake is much more expensive than a robots.txt error.
What about images, PDFs, and downloads on a static site?
Blocking crawlers from your pages does not automatically protect your images or files. A training crawler that cannot fetch your HTML can still fetch an image URL it found elsewhere. For images, the noimageai meta tag on the pages that embed them is the practical control, and on a static site you can add it to every page in seconds. For PDFs and downloads, the cleanest approach is to disallow their folders in robots.txt, for example Disallow: /downloads/ for a training crawler group, so the files are never fetched in the first place.
Our guides to protecting images from AI training and protecting PDFs and downloads go deeper on both.
How to verify your blocks actually work
Verification is the step most people skip, and it is the step that catches the mistakes. Do these three checks after any change.
First, fetch your robots.txt or view your page source and confirm the rule or tag is live. A rule sitting in a draft or on the wrong domain protects nothing.
Second, check your server or Cloudflare logs a week later for the bot names you blocked. A well-behaved bot fetches robots.txt once and then stops requesting your pages. If the same bot is still requesting pages daily, it is either ignoring your rules or hitting a cached copy of the old file.
Third, verify that you did not block the wrong bots. Check that Googlebot is still crawling and that your pages still appear in search results. A robots.txt that blocks everything is a bigger problem than a robots.txt that blocks nothing, and it is an easy mistake to make when you copy a blocklist from the internet.
FAQ
Can I add a robots.txt file to Carrd?
No. Carrd does not offer file uploads or a robots.txt setting. Your options are meta tags on a Pro plan, Cloudflare in front of your custom domain, or moving the site to a host you control.
Do noai meta tags work on Carrd?
Yes, if you can add them to your page head, which requires a Carrd Pro plan. The tag is a request that compliant AI companies honor. It does not stop a crawler from fetching the page, only from using the content for training.
Does Cloudflare's AI crawler block work with Carrd?
Yes. If your Carrd site uses a custom domain routed through Cloudflare, the one-click AI crawler block and WAF custom rules both work, because the blocking happens at Cloudflare before the request reaches Carrd.
Should I block AI crawlers on a portfolio site?
It depends on what the portfolio is for. If the portfolio exists to get you hired or found, AI citations can help, so block only the training crawlers and leave the answer-engine crawlers alone. If the work is private or client-owned, block everything.
Is moving from Carrd to Netlify worth it just for robots.txt?
For most single-page sites, yes if AI control matters to you. The move takes an afternoon, the hosting is free at small scale, and you gain robots.txt, server rules, and full control over headers. If you stay on Carrd, Cloudflare is the next-best option.
Will blocking GPTBot hurt my Google rankings?
No. GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler and has nothing to do with Google Search. Blocking it does not affect your Google rankings. Only blocking Googlebot, or blocking the AI search crawlers that feed citations, changes your visibility, and those are separate decisions.
If you want the easy version, generate your file with the free robots.txt generator, test it with the robots.txt tester, and read our complete list of AI crawlers before you decide which bots to block.
