How To Tell AI Not To Train On Your Art — But Keep Your Art Visible In AI Search

Newsletter | 001

Artists need AI Protection features on their websites.

AI bots crawl your website every day. Some want to copy your art to train the next image generator. Others want to find your work and point people to it. Same technology, very different goals.

Most of the advice I see tells artists to “block AI.” I don’t think that’s an effective strategy. If you block every AI bot, your website also disappears from the AI tools people now use to search for artists and art. A smarter move — and one we’ve built into **ArtistsZone** — is to sort the training bots from the search bots, and block the training bots, but also welcome the search bots. You also want to protect your images from AI copying.

Here’s how to do this, step-by-step, in plain English.

Two Kinds of AI Bots

This is the essence of the game, so I’ll start here.

Training Bots

Training Bots copy your content to build AI models. When an image generator learns to paint “in the style of” living artists, it learns from work it finds online including yours — often without asking permission or paying any compensation. Blocking these bots keeps your art out of future training sets.

Search Bots

Search Bots fetch your content in real-time to answer questions. When someone asks an AI assistant “who are good illustrators for a children’s book?” a search bot goes and looks. If your site is open to those AI Search Bots, your site can show up in that answer. Block AI Search Bots, and your site vanishes from the conversation.

Here’s the part that makes this possible: the big AI companies run separate bots for each job. That means you can tell the training bots to stay out while letting the search bots in. These are the bots I care about right now:

One thing on Google: Google-Extended only controls AI training. Regular Google Search runs on Googlebot, which you should never block — block the Googlebot and your site drops out of search entirely.

Step 1: Set Up Your robots.txt

robots.txt is a plain text file that lives at the root of your site (yoursite.com/robots.txt). It tells bots what they’re allowed to touch on your site. Most website tools let you edit it directly, and WordPress SEO plugins usually have a field for it.

Below is an example robots.txt file. I recommend using this file to opt-out of AI training bots while staying visible to AI search bots.

Example robots.txt File:

# --- Block AI TRAINING crawlers ---

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

# --- Allow AI SEARCH / retrieval crawlers ---

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

That’s the whole recipe. Training bots get a closed door. Search bots get a welcome mat.

Two things I want you to watch:

• Skip the old Anthropic names. You’ll see Claude-Web and anthropic-ai in older guides. They’re dead. Sites still using them aren’t blocking anything. Use ClaudeBot.
• Review it 2–4 times every year. New AI bots show up every few months. A robots.txt written in 2023 is already out of date. I’ll update this post each year to help you stay updated.

Step 2: Understand What robots.txt Can’t Do

Here’s the honest part I won’t sugarcoat, and the part most guides skip.

robots.txt is a polite request, not a lock. It works only for bots that have been coded to obey it. The named companies above say their crawlers respect it. But a large share of AI crawlers ignore the rules completely. Some scrapers hide their identity. Perplexity has been caught running stealth crawlers to slip past no-crawl instructions, and ByteDance’s Bytespider has a documented history of ignoring them. Better transparency and regulation are needed.

Think of robots.txt as the sign on the front door. It stops honest visitors. It does nothing against everyone else.

For real protection of artists images on their websites you need more layers. This is precisely why AI Protection features are built-in on every ArtistsZone Artist Website — including a pre-configured robots.txt file.

1. robots.txt — the sign. Stops well-behaved bots.
2. Server-level blocking — the lock. Rules on your server or firewall (WAF) that return a hard “no” (a 403 error) to known bad bots, whether or not they read your robots.txt.
3. Image protection tools — the armor. Tools like ArtistsZone AI Protection features, Glaze, and Nightshade alter your images at the pixel level so that even if a bot grabs them, they’re much harder to train on. Watermarking adds another visible layer of ownership.

No single layer is enough. Stacked together, these different layers of protection give you a real defense system.

Step 3: Make Your Site Easy for Search Bots to Read

Blocking AI training is only half the job. If you want to show up in AI search results, you have to make your work easy to find and easy to understand. This is SEO, and it’s where I see most artist websites leave big value on the table.

Allow search bots to crawl your content. To do this check two things. First, check that your robots.txt file allows search bots (we did that in the step above). Second, check that your website host and/or CDN isn’t quietly blocking them anyway — this happens a lot with sites that use Cloudflare. If your CDN firewall is rejecting all AI bot requests, having an open robots.txt file doesn’t matter.

Don’t hide your art behind code. A lot of portfolio sites load galleries with JavaScript. Bots often can’t see content rendered via JavaScript. Make sure your key content (images, galleries, work descriptions, etc.) and text load as plain HTML, not just as scripts. And be sure none of your work content sits behind a login requirement.

How to check (30 seconds, no tech skills needed):

1. Open one of your pages in a browser on a laptop or desktop computer.
2. Pick a sentence you know is on the page — a work title or a description works well.
3. Open the page’s raw code. How you do this depends on your browser:

• Chrome or Edge: Right-click the page and choose “View Page Source” (or press Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+U on Mac).
• Firefox: Right-click the page and choose “View Page Source” (or press Ctrl+U / Cmd+U).
• Safari: Turn this on once — go to Safari → Settings → Advanced and check “Show features for web developers.” Then right-click the page and choose “Show Page Source” (or press Option+Cmd+U).

4. Once the raw code opens, press Ctrl+F (Windows) or Cmd+F (Mac) to search, and paste in your sentence.

Found it? That text is plain HTML — bots can read it.

Didn’t find it? It’s being added by JavaScript, and that’s the part to fix.

The Fix: Use your builder’s plain text and heading blocks for important content (work titles, descriptions, dimensions, price, etc.), or ask whoever manages your site to “make sure content is ‘server-side rendered’.” — that’s the phrase to give your developer.

Write so answers are easy to pull. AI tools quote short, clear chunks of text. Help them:

• Put the point first. Say the important thing at the start of each section, don’t bury it at the bottom.
• Keep paragraphs short — two or three sentences (generally — there are always exceptions).
• Use clear headings and lists.

Sites built this way get pulled into AI answers far more often than sites with vague and unclear headlines and walls of text.

Step 4: Fix The Thing Most Artists Miss — Your Images

A search bot can’t see your painting the way a person does. It reads the words around the image. On most art sites, those words are missing or useless. Fix that, and you fix your biggest visibility gap.

For every image on your website:

Write clear alt text. Describe the work: the medium, the theme, the collection, the artist. Not “artwork1.”

Add captions. Add a short line under each piece — tell what it is, what it’s part of.

Name your files properly. Use coastal-series-oil-painting.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg.

Add a short description block for each artist or collection, in plain language. A “description block” is just a short paragraph of real text — 2 to 4 sentences — that sits on the page near the artist’s name or the collection title. Its whole job is to say in plain words what a bot can’t get from looking at the images.

What to put in a description block. Answer the questions a person (or an AI) would ask:

• Who is the artist / what is the collection?
• What’s the medium and style?
• What’s the theme or subject?
• What makes it distinct?

Here’s a simple fill-in template:

[Artist name] is a [medium] artist based in [place] whose work explores [theme]. This collection, [name], features [what it is] created with [technique/materials]. [One line on what makes it stand out.]

Here’s an example filled in for an artist:

Maria Chen is a mixed-media painter based in Atlanta whose work explores memory and landscape. Her Coastal Series pairs oil painting with digital layering, printed at large format and reworked by hand. Each piece captures a single stretch of the Georgia shoreline at a different time of day.

Here’s an example filled in for a collection:

Tidelines is a 12-piece collection of large-format seascapes. The works combine hand-painted oil textures with digitally-built compositions. The series follows one coastline through a full year of changing light and weather.

How to add a description block, on any platform:

1. Add a text block (every website builder has one — it may be called “Text,” “Paragraph,” or “Rich Text”).
2. Type your description as normal body text, not text baked into an image. Bots read real text; they can’t read words inside a picture.
3. Set the artist name or collection title as a heading (H2 or H3) right above the paragraph.
4. Place the block high on the page, above the gallery — the top of the page carries the most weight.
5. Keep it plainly visible. Don’t hide it inside a popup, tab, slideshow, or image caption that only appears on click. If a person has to click to see it, a bot may never see it at all.
6. Give each artist and each collection its own block on its own page, so every one has its own findable text.

Here’s the good news: description block text helps your website get found without compromising your images. Your robots.txt split keeps training bots away from your images. ArtistsZone AI Protection features, Glaze, Nightshade, and watermarking protect your image files. So lean into rich descriptions and use description blocks — they’re safe, and they work.

What I’d Skip (Don’t Waste Your Time Here)

Two popular tactics get oversold. I don’t use them.

1. llms.txt. This is a proposed file meant to hand AI a map of your site. It sounds smart, but there’s no solid proof it helps. In May 2026, Google’s own guidance on AI search flatly called it unnecessary and even listed it as a myth. It’s a five-minute experiment if you’re curious — not a strategy.
2. Heavy schema markup. Structured data is fine for normal SEO, but I wouldn’t count on it to buy you AI citations. Google has said plainly that no special markup is required to appear in its AI answers, and a 2026 study found that adding it made no measurable difference to AI citations for pages already showing up. Do the basics; skip the obsession.

The real winners are still the boring fundamentals: reachable content, clear writing, good image descriptions, and content that delivers value to your site visitors.

AI Protection & Search Visibility Checklist

Do these things for best results. — Download the AI Protection & Search Visibility Checklist

Protect your work from training:

• Add the robots.txt file above to your website to block training bots.
• Confirm your host/CDN (e.g. Cloudflare) isn’t blocking search bots by mistake.
• Add server-level or firewall rules that return a 403 to known bad bots.
• Run your images through Glaze and/or Nightshade before posting.
• Apply watermarking as a visible ownership layer.

Stay visible in AI search:

• Confirm the search bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, etc.) are allowed.
• Make sure key content loads as plain HTML, not JavaScript-only.
• Write real alt text and captions for every piece.
• Rename image files with descriptive names.
• Add a short plain-language description for each artist and collection.
• Put the point first in every section; keep paragraphs short.

Don’t bother:

• Skip llms.txt files.
• Skip heavy Schema Markup.

Write clear well-structured content instead.

The Bottom Line

You don’t have to choose between hiding your art and giving it away. Block the training bots. Welcome the search bots. Lock your images down with real tools, not just a polite text file. And describe your work well enough that when someone asks an AI to find an artist like you, it can.Protection and visibility aren’t opposites. Set them up right, and they work together. That’s the whole idea behind what I’m building.

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ArtistsZone launches later this month. If you’re an artist who wants an all-in-one website with AI Protection and artist marketing features built-in **visit ArtistsZone.net and [Join The Waitlist](https://artistszone.net/students/#join-the-waitlist)**.