Short answer: no
Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended does not change how Google Search ranks your pages. Google Search is crawled by Googlebot. Google’s generative products use a different token: Google-Extended.
Googlebot vs Google-Extended
Googlebot discovers and indexes pages for google.com. If you block Googlebot, you will drop out of Google Search. That is ordinary SEO, not an AI-crawler question.
Google-Extended controls whether Google may use your content to train Gemini and related generative products. Google documents it as separate from Search and ranking. Blocking Google-Extended is a training-data choice, not a ranking penalty.
Why this confusion exists
“AI crawler” sounds like one switch. It is not. Training bots collect data for weights. Search and fetch bots retrieve pages for live answers. Search-engine bots like Googlebot still do classic indexing. You can allow Googlebot, block Google-Extended, and keep ranking in Google while opting out of Gemini training.
A safe robots.txt pattern
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /This keeps Google Search open, opts out of Gemini training, and blocks OpenAI training. Add search/fetch bots separately if you want ChatGPT or Perplexity visibility. GPTBot is not ChatGPT-User.
What can still go wrong
A CDN, theme, or “SEO cleanup” sometimes ships User-agent: * with Disallow: /. That blocks Googlebot too, and that will hurt rankings. The failure is the blanket rule, not the AI-specific tokens.
Check the live file before you assume a plugin “only blocked AI.” Use the user-agent list and a report for your domain.