Hi everyone,

I run a massive directory website covering tens of thousands of towns, villages, and local businesses for a specific country. Recently, the Zero-Click effect has become brutal. For exact-match location queries, I’m ranking #1 to #3, but my CTR is sitting between 1% and 3%. The Google Local Pack and maps are simply eating all the clicks before users even scroll.

Right now, I have GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended blocked in my robots.txt because I didn't want them scraping my massive structured database for free to train their models.

However, I'm reconsidering this strategy. Since Google Maps is already answering the simple "where is this town" queries, I'm wondering if I should "open the tap" and let the AI bots in. My theory is that by allowing LLMs to crawl my deep structured data (full lists of regions and towns inside the regions), my site might become a cited source (with a link) in ChatGPT, Claude, or SearchGPT when users ask complex, long-tail questions that Google Maps fails to answer.

Has anyone here opened their robots.txt to AI bots specifically to chase citation traffic? Is the referral traffic from ChatGPT/SearchGPT actually moving the needle for you, or am I just giving away my database for free?

Would love to hear your thoughts.