Kinsta doesn’t set out to block AI crawlers, but every Kinsta site sits behind Kinsta’s integrated Cloudflare layer, and you don’t get a Cloudflare dashboard for it. Edge-level challenges on Kinsta get resolved through MyKinsta and Kinsta support rather than Cloudflare settings.
How to tell it’s the Kinsta layer: the crawler check in Blaze AI Discovery reports a block or challenge with Cloudflare response headers present, on a site you never added to Cloudflare yourself.
- Check what you control in MyKinsta. Per site, review the IP Deny list and any geolocation blocking you or a previous developer configured.
- Everything at the Cloudflare layer goes through support. Open a Kinsta support chat, give them the specific user agents the check flagged (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), and ask two questions: is the integrated Cloudflare layer challenging these crawlers on my site, and can you allow verified AI crawlers through. We host client stores on Kinsta and have this exact conversation with their support – they can see the edge logs you can’t.
- Rule out your own stack. A security plugin on top of Kinsta blocks independently of the host – see Why Is Wordfence Blocking GPTBot and Other AI Crawlers? – and robots.txt rules still apply: How Do I Allow AI Crawlers in robots.txt – and Which Ones Should I Allow?.
- Verify with a re-run after support confirms the change.