AI Crawler

AI crawlers are web crawling bots deployed by AI companies to discover, access, and index web content. Major AI crawlers include GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity AI), and Google-Extended (Google/Gemini). These crawlers serve two purposes: collecting data for model training and indexing content for real-time retrieval.

Managing AI crawler access is a critical component of technical SEO for AI visibility. Website owners can control which AI crawlers can access their content through robots.txt directives. Blocking AI crawlers prevents your content from being used in AI responses, while allowing them increases your chances of being cited.

Best practices include allowing beneficial AI crawlers in robots.txt, creating AI-specific sitemaps, ensuring clean HTML that AI crawlers can parse efficiently, and implementing structured data that enhances AI extractability.