reach
Conclusion: Check what the crawlers get. The rest isn't yours.
Being refused and being ignored produce exactly the same silence, and only one of them is your problem. Before concluding that a system will not read you, settle the part you control.
A site that suspected it was being blocked checked directly. GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and bingbot all returned 200, on the page and on every machine-readable file it published. Nothing was being turned away. The consumer assistant that had failed to find the site was not being refused — it was not looking, and answering from priors about the domain instead.
That is an afternoon's work and it splits the problem cleanly. Whether anything can get in is yours to fix. Whether anything chooses to spend a fetch on you is mostly not.
The rest does improve on its own — domains age, indexes refresh, providers change their stacks. Two weeks after the failure above, the same prompt on the same surface returned five citations, all five the real domain, and a clean assessment. The on-page fix designed for the problem had never shipped, which is its own warning: an improvement is not proof you caused it.