Comparing Naples SEO and SEO Elite Agency, starting with a file you can read yourself

Credit where it's due

SEO Elite Agency is a Naples agency, and before we compare anything, some honest credit. They work the same Collier County market we do. Their public pages market answer engine optimization and AI-related search services. Taking AI search seriously is the right instinct. When a roofer in Golden Gate or a med spa near Fifth Avenue South asks ChatGPT or Google's AI who to call, somebody's pages get read and cited. An agency that sees that coming deserves credit for it.

This page stays in one narrow lane. We say nothing about their pricing, reviews, staff, history, or client results, because we don't know those things and won't pretend to. We compare exactly one structural difference, we date it, and we show you how to verify it without trusting either of us.

The July 10, 2026 record

Nearly every website publishes a plain text file called robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may and may not read. On July 10, 2026, we opened seoeliteagency.com/robots.txt. Here is what the file contained on that date:

• A Cloudflare-managed block that fully disallows a list of AI crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Amazonbot, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, meta-externalagent, and CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler.
• A content signal of ai-train=no set for all user agents, which tells AI systems not to use the site's content for training.
• And one thing beyond the file itself: when our research tooling tried to read their homepage while we were writing this page, the server answered HTTP 403 Forbidden, including to AI-agent user agents.

That's the whole finding. An agency that markets AEO and AI-related services had, on that date, a robots.txt telling the major AI content crawlers to stay out, and a server that turned our tooling away at the door. The block matches Cloudflare's managed AI-crawler blocking. Whether it was a deliberate choice is a question only they can answer, and we won't guess from the outside.

What each blocked crawler actually controls

Robots.txt directives are narrow instruments, and it's easy to make a block sound scarier than it is. So here is what each signal in that file actually does, stated as precisely as we can:

• GPTBot is OpenAI's training-content crawler. Blocking it keeps content out of OpenAI's training collection. It does not by itself control ChatGPT search, because retrieval there is handled by a different agent, OAI-SearchBot, and OAI-SearchBot was not named in their July file.
• Google-Extended governs whether Google may use a site's content for Gemini training and grounding. It does not touch classic Google indexing, and it does not control eligibility for AI Overviews, which draw from Google's normal search index.
• ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler; blocking it keeps content out of Claude's crawl. CCBot feeds Common Crawl, a public dataset many AI systems train on.
• PerplexityBot was not named in the July file, so on paper, Perplexity's live retrieval was not blocked by robots.txt.
• The HTTP 403 is a different layer entirely. Robots.txt is a polite request; a 403 is a locked door. Whatever the file says, our tooling got a hard server-level refusal when it tried to read the homepage on July 10, 2026.

Put together, the July file did not block everything: two retrieval doors, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, were open on paper, while the training and grounding crawlers for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google's Gemini, and Common Crawl were told to stay out, and the one live test we ran that day hit a 403.

Risk, not verdict

Let's be careful here, because this is where comparison pages usually get dishonest. We are not claiming SEO Elite Agency ranks poorly anywhere, and we are not claiming their clients are invisible in any engine. We have no idea. Their robots.txt tells you nothing about the work they do for clients, whose sites have their own files and their own settings.

What the July finding supported was one narrow statement: on that date, on their own website, the front door was closed to several of the systems they sell optimization for. It was a risk signal, not a verdict, and by October 3, 2026 they had opened that door. As of mid-2026, AI assistants answer more and more "who should I call" questions by reading pages they can reach and citing sources they can quote. Content that training crawlers can't collect stays out of the models those crawlers feed. Whether that costs anything, and how much, is genuinely debatable. That an AEO vendor should have a crisp answer about it is not.

In July this was an interview question rather than a dealbreaker, and their October file answers it: the AI crawlers are welcome, and model training is declined through a content signal. That is the legitimate version of the choice, stated in the file itself. If you are talking to them now, the better questions are the ones any AI search vendor should answer well: how client sites are configured, and how they measure whether the engines read and cite those sites.

How we handle the same question on our own site

The fairest way to compare agencies is to look at each one's own website, because that's the one client every agency fully controls. Here's ours, all checkable today:

• Our robots.txt explicitly allows AI crawlers, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended, verified again on October 3, 2026. Open naplesseo.com/robots.txt and read it.
• We publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt, the plain-text site maps proposed at llmstxt.org. No engine has committed to honoring the format, so we treat it as cheap insurance and a crawlability signal, never a ranking lever. Our guide to what llms.txt is covers it in plain English.
• We publish pricing: Local at $750 a month, Growth at $1,500, Dominate from $3,000, all month to month. AI search optimization is included in every plan, not just the top tier.
• We publish case studies from day one, baseline first, with real numbers added as they land. Our first, SWFL Media Blasters, was published on day one of the engagement, baseline first, before there were any results to brag about. We never publish invented results.

The same honesty rule applies to us as to them: we will not promise you rankings. We set a 90-day ramp expectation with every client and expect long-tail movement first. If you want to understand the work itself, start with our AI search optimization service page, and the llms.txt and AI crawlability service if the robots.txt side of this page hit home.

Who should still pick SEO Elite Agency

An honest comparison page names the cases where the other shop is the right call:

• You already work with them and it's going well. A robots.txt file was never a reason to blow up a good working relationship, and theirs now welcomes the AI crawlers.
• Their October 3, 2026 file already answers the July question: crawlers welcome, model training declined by a content signal. If the rest of their answers hold up, the July finding no longer matters.
• You've met them, you like them, and you trust your read. Local relationships carry real weight in this market, and we'd rather you hire a Naples agency you trust than stall for months.

Check both files yourself

Don't take our word for any of this. The whole point of anchoring the page to robots.txt is that you don't need us, or them, to interpret it:

• Open seoeliteagency.com/robots.txt in any browser. On October 3, 2026 it named GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and other AI crawlers with Allow lines and set ai-train=no.
• Open naplesseo.com/robots.txt the same way. Look for the explicit allows.
• Then check your own site. Our guide to checking whether AI can read your site walks through it in a few minutes, no technical background required.

Every snapshot here carries a date because robots.txt can change in an afternoon, and this one changed between our two readings: in July we wrote that unblocking the crawlers would be genuinely good and the right move, and on October 3, 2026 their file welcomed them. The comparison is narrower now, which is how a dated comparison should work. If you want to know where your own site stands with AI crawlers and classic search, request a free audit and we'll send the report within 1 business day.

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