AI Crawler

An AI crawler is a bot that scrapes your website so an AI company can feed the content into their models. GPTBot works for OpenAI. ClaudeBot works for Anthropic. Google-Extended works for Google's AI features. There are others, and new ones appear regularly.

If you've worked with Googlebot for SEO, you understand the concept. AI crawlers do the same thing, but instead of determining your search ranking, they determine whether AI knows you exist.

The Major AI Crawlers

GPTBot (OpenAI). Crawls content for ChatGPT and OpenAI's products. Identified by the user agent "GPTBot." This is the one most companies focus on first because ChatGPT has the largest user base. ClaudeBot (Anthropic). Crawls for Claude. User agent "ClaudeBot." Anthropic has been more conservative in their crawling compared to OpenAI, but Claude's growing user base makes this increasingly important. Google-Extended. Controls whether Google uses your content for Gemini and AI Overviews. This is separate from Googlebot, so you can allow traditional search crawling while blocking AI training. PerplexityBot. Crawls for Perplexity's AI search engine. Perplexity does real-time retrieval, so this crawler actively pulls content when users ask questions. Others include CCBot (Common Crawl, used by many AI companies), Bytespider (ByteDance), and Applebot-Extended (Apple Intelligence).

To Block or Not to Block

Some companies block AI crawlers out of principle. They don't want their content used to train AI models without compensation. That's a valid stance. But it has consequences for AI visibility.

If you block GPTBot, ChatGPT has less information about you. Less information means fewer mentions. Fewer mentions means lower AI visibility. You might be standing on principle while your competitors get recommended because they left the door open.

The calculus depends on your business. If AI visibility drives revenue, blocking crawlers is directly costing you money. If your content is your product (publishers, media companies), the equation is more nuanced.

Most B2B companies should allow AI crawlers. The benefit of being visible in AI responses typically outweighs the cost of having your content used for training. You want AI to know about you. That requires letting it read your site.

How to Check Your Setup

Your robots.txt file controls crawler access. Check it. Many companies don't realize their robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, either from old configurations or CMS defaults.

To allow all AI crawlers:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

To block specific crawlers while allowing others, replace Allow with Disallow for the ones you want to block. You can also block specific paths if you want to allow general crawling but protect certain content.

Beyond Robots.txt

Letting crawlers in is table stakes. What they find when they arrive matters more. If your site is mostly JavaScript-rendered single-page app content, crawlers might not see much. Server-side rendered content is more reliably crawled.

Structured data helps crawlers understand your content. Schema markup, clear heading hierarchies, and well-organized site structure all make it easier for AI systems to extract useful information from your pages. See AI content optimization for the full playbook.

AI crawlers visit periodically, not continuously. New content might take days or weeks to get indexed. If you publish a major product update, don't expect AI to know about it immediately. Some platforms like Perplexity with real-time retrieval are faster. Others rely on periodic crawls and model updates.

Check your server logs to see which AI crawlers are actually visiting your site and how frequently. That data tells you which platforms have the freshest picture of your brand.

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Related: AI Crawlers | LLM | AI Content Optimization