refusal
An engine declining to answer.
What refusal does not show
A refusal is not evidence about your site: it is evidence about the engine policy at that moment, and treating it as a site defect inverts cause and effect.
How CrawlCheck measures refusal
4 finding codes measure it. Each one’s share of all scans is computed from the live corpus when this page is served, not typed into it.
| Finding code | Share of scans | Guide |
|---|---|---|
ANSWER_ENGINE_REFUSED | 5.7% | Is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers on your site? What changes on 15 September 2026 |
ORIGIN_REFUSED_SCANNER | 0.2% | dataset |
HOMEPAGE_REFUSED | 1.7% | How to block AI crawlers and agents, and what each block costs you |
UNIFORM_REFUSAL | 7.8% | How to check whether AI crawlers and agents can read your site |
Every code, its rule and its current rate: the dataset page. Scan a site to see which apply to it.
Where refusal comes up on this site
- Is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers on your site? What changes on 15 September 2026The refusal happens to a different client, from a different address, and produces no error anyone on your team will ever see.
- How to check whether AI crawlers and agents can read your siteSo a refusal here is not proof your firewall is blocking OpenAI — it is proof that something at your edge treats that identity differently, which is worth knowing either way.
- How to rank in ChatGPT: the part that is actually in your controlThe refusal was at the edge, where almost nobody configures this deliberately.
- Free AI visibility checkers: what the free tier actually measuresWhat a refusal should do to a score One behaviour separates a careful free tool from a careless one, and it is worth testing deliberately.
- How to block AI crawlers and agents, and what each block costs youANSWER_ENGINE_REFUSED fires on of scans, and in most of those cases the refusal was not in the file the owner had been editing.
Definitions that name refusal
homepage refused · sitemap origin error · graded through a wall · rate limiting · bot management platform · Direct prompt injection · action assurance
Related terms in Answer engines and retrieval
How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
AEO · GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · grounding · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · AI Overview · answer engine · citation · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Query fan-out · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · information gain · dense retrieval
Questions about refusal
What is refusal?
An engine declining to answer.
What does refusal not show or guarantee?
A refusal is not evidence about your site: it is evidence about the engine policy at that moment, and treating it as a site defect inverts cause and effect.
How does CrawlCheck measure refusal?
Through the finding codes ANSWER_ENGINE_REFUSED, ORIGIN_REFUSED_SCANNER, HOMEPAGE_REFUSED, UNIFORM_REFUSAL, each with a stated rule, evidence bytes and a live share of scans on the dataset page.
Which area of the glossary does refusal belong to?
Answer engines and retrieval: How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
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See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.