Disclosure: I'm Daehyeon Nam (남대현), founder and CEO of Trina Inc. (주식회사 트리나), a four-person company in Gyeongju, South Korea that builds GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) agents. This post describes a study we ran ourselves, and there is one company link at the very end. I have a commercial interest here and I'd rather say so up front than bury it. Everything below is self-contained — you don't need to follow any link to check the reasoning.
Korea's dominant blogging platform, Naver Blog, shows up in Google results for Korean queries constantly. It shows up in generative AI answers never. We measured it. The cause turned out not to be content quality. It was four lines in a robots.txt file.
We designed a query set around dental care in Korea, ran it against two generative engines, and collected every source each engine offered as the basis for its answer.
| Item | Value | |---|---| | Queries | 120 (10 regions × 10 procedures × 6 intents, stratified) | | Reproducibility | drawn with a seeded LCG — the same 120 queries come back every run | | Engines | ChatGPT, Gemini | | Citations collected | 2,435 | | Discrimination sample | 2,597 | | Features | 33 | | Control | Google organic top results for the same queries |
The control group is the whole ballgame. Without it, a model just learns to separate "dental pages" from "random pages," which is trivially true and useless. What we actually wanted to know was: which pages show up in search but never get cited by AI, and why?
| Channel | Google organic appearances | AI citations | |---|---:|---:| | Naver Blog | 128 (12.0%) | 0 | | Tistory | 13 (1.2%) | 91 |
Naver Blog appeared in Google organic results for these queries roughly 10× more often than Tistory. Tistory took essentially all of the AI citations.
Across the entire Naver family — Blog, Cafe, Post, and Knowledge-iN combined — we found 1 citation out of 2,435, and that one was Knowledge-iN.
This isn't a channel performing slightly worse at the margin. It's a channel that exists on one surface and not on the other.
This is the part I'd most like developers to take away, independent of anything else in this post. GPTBot and Google-Extended are training crawlers. OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User are retrieval crawlers — they're read at answer time, and they're what makes your document quotable in a response.
Blocking the first group says "don't train a model on my writing." Blocking the second says "make sure my writing can never be quoted in an AI answer."
Those are completely different decisions, and robots.txt lets you specify them separately. Plenty of sites make the second choice while believing they only made the first.
Naver Blog blocks both and explicitly forbids RAG in a comment. No amount of content quality gets through that gate.
We took the top 60 cited domains plus the top 60 search domains (90 unique after dedup), fetched each robots.txt, and parsed the allow/deny status of six AI bots: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, CCBot.
| Domain group | Count | Search queries | Citation queries | Conversion | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:| | Blocks AI bots | 8 | 171 | 29 | 0.17× | | Open | 82 | 559 | 455 | 0.81× |
Showing up in search converts to getting cited at roughly one-fifth the rate if you block AI crawlers.
Because blocking policy varies by domain, the web ran an experiment for us. The test: if which bot a domain blocks predicts which engine fails to cite it, then this is a mechanism, not a correlation.
| Blocking pattern | Search | ChatGPT | Gemini | |---|---:|---:|---:| | Training bots only (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User left open) | 4 | 7 | 0 | | OpenAI bots blocked, Google-Extended left open | 22 | 0 | 42 | | GPTBot only | 5 | 0 | 10 | | All six blocked (blog.naver.com) | 69 | 0 | 0 |