---
title: "AI agents fetch pages differently"
date: 2026-07-14
description: "A 308 redirect broke ChatGPT's retrieval but not Claude's. Same URL, different behavior."
---

I assumed that if a page was public, allowed by `robots.txt`, and in the sitemap, any AI assistant would be able to read it.

That wasn't always true.

This site redirected `benmcadams.info` → `www.benmcadams.info` with a standard [308](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7538). Claude followed it and read the page fine. ChatGPT's retrieval tool couldn't get there.

Doesn't prove ChatGPT never follows redirects. It does show that retrieval systems can behave very differently on the same URL.

The takeaway I'm sitting with: point the URLs in your sitemap, canonical metadata, and internal links directly at a `200 OK`. Every hop is another chance for something to fail.

Fewer retrieval steps, fewer opportunities to fail.