If an AI crawler can't fetch your page, you can't be cited — period.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity build answers from pages their crawlers can actually read. A robots.txt disallow, a firewall rule, or bot-protection middleware that returns 403 to GPTBot silently removes you from every answer those engines generate. The page looks fine in your browser, so nobody notices — until a competitor gets the citation instead.