For photographers and studios

The setting that makes photographers invisible to AI

Photographers have a specific and largely invisible problem: the platforms many of you build on ship with settings that tell AI systems to stay away. It is defensible as a policy. It is a disaster if nobody told you it was switched on.

What we found on a Cincinnati photographer's site

Diislens Photography, a portrait and wedding photographer here in Cincinnati, had a robots.txt file serving a Disallow instruction to eight AI crawlers by name — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended among them — plus a separate signal refusing AI use altogether.

The owner never chose any of it. It was a platform default. The practical effect is that when somebody asks an assistant for a wedding photographer in Cincinnati, that business cannot be part of the answer, because the engines were explicitly told not to look.

The full write-up is at /work/photographer-ai-crawler-block.

How to check your own in about a minute

Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser — for example yourstudio.com/robots.txt. Read what comes back. If you see Disallow: / under any of GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, CCBot or Google-Extended, those engines have been told to stay out.

Worth knowing the nuance: this is a legitimate choice. Some photographers genuinely do not want their images used as training data, and that is a reasonable position. The problem is only that it is often on by default, it is rarely explained, and blocking a crawler does not just protect your images — it also removes you from answers where somebody was looking to hire you.

The second problem: images are not readable

A photography site is mostly pictures, which is right for humans and nearly useless for an engine deciding who to recommend. If there is no text saying what you shoot, where you work, what a session involves and what it costs, there is nothing for an answer to be built from.

This is fixable without ruining the design: real alt text, service and location pages, structured data, and a genuine written description of the work. The portfolio stays the hero.

What we do

• Audit and fix the crawler configuration — deliberately, to whatever you actually want.
• Google Business Profile claimed and complete.
• Review requests automated after each session or wedding delivery.
• Text and structured data an engine can read, without touching the look of the portfolio.
• Citations across the directories that feed local answers.

We do not guarantee any engine will recommend you. Nobody can. No engine sells placement and none publish how they rank. What we do is improve the signals they demonstrably read, then measure it monthly and report it whether it moved or not.

How we measure it

We run twenty real buyer questions for your market past ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, three times each. Twenty questions, four engines, three runs is 240 checks. Three runs because these answers vary between runs, and a single check cannot tell a business that gets recommended reliably from one that got named once by luck. That first run is a baseline; the same questions are re-run every month against the same engines, so movement is comparable instead of a moved goalpost.

Questions we get asked

Should I block AI crawlers to protect my images?

That is a real decision with a genuine trade-off and it should be yours, made knowingly. Blocking limits training use and also removes you from hiring recommendations. Most photographers we speak to did not know the setting existed. We will implement whichever way you choose — the point is that you choose.

My site is on Squarespace or Pixieset. Does that matter?

Those platforms are fine. What matters is which defaults they applied and whether you own the address people find you at. Both are checkable in a few minutes.

How do reviews work for a photographer?

Weddings and portrait sessions have a natural, emotional high point at delivery — that is the moment to ask, and almost nobody does it consistently. Automating that one request at gallery delivery is the single highest-return habit in this trade.

What does it cost?

Scoped on a call. Call (513) 968-4165.