Semiconducting graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are envisioned to play an important role in future electronics. This requires the GNRs to be placed on a surface where they may become strained. Theory predicts that axial strain, i.e. in-plane bending of the GNR, will cause a change in the band gap of the GNR. This may negatively affect device performance. Using the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope we controllably bent and buckled atomically well-defined narrow armchair GNR and subsequently probed the changes in the local density of states. These experiments show that the band gap of 7-ac-GNR is very robust to in-plane bending and out-of-plane buckling.