AI Crawler

AI Crawlers are automated programs (bots) used by AI companies to discover, access, and index web content. This content may be used for training language models or for real-time retrieval in RAG systems.

Major AI Crawlers:

GPTBot (OpenAI)

• User-Agent: GPTBot
• Purpose: Training data, ChatGPT Browse
• Respects: robots.txt

ClaudeBot (Anthropic)

• User-Agent: ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai
• Purpose: Training data, retrieval
• Respects: robots.txt

PerplexityBot

• User-Agent: PerplexityBot
• Purpose: Real-time search retrieval
• Respects: robots.txt

Google-Extended

• User-Agent: Google-Extended
• Purpose: AI training (separate from Googlebot)
• Respects: robots.txt

CCBot (Common Crawl)

• User-Agent: CCBot
• Purpose: Open dataset used by many AI companies
• Respects: robots.txt

Managing AI Crawler Access:

In your robots.txt file, you can allow or disallow specific AI crawlers:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

Best Practices:

• Allow AI crawlers for public marketing content
• Block sensitive areas (admin, user data, private pages)
• Monitor crawler activity in server logs
• Keep content fresh and accessible