What Are AI Crawlers?
A new class of bots is reading your website — not to rank it, but to train models and answer questions live. Knowing which AI crawlers matter, and how to control them, is now part of technical SEO.
Quick Answer
AI crawlers are automated bots operated by AI companies to fetch web content for large language models — either to train future models or to retrieve live information when answering a user's question. Common examples include OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. You control their access through your robots.txt file.
Training vs retrieval: the distinction that matters
Not all AI crawlers do the same job, and conflating them leads to bad decisions. There are broadly three purposes. Training crawlers (like GPTBot in its training role, or ClaudeBot) collect content that may be used to train future model versions. Live-retrieval crawlers (like OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, or PerplexityBot) fetch pages in real time to answer a specific query — this is how your content gets cited in an answer right now. Training-control tokens like Google-Extended do not crawl at all; they are a signal that tells Google whether your already-crawled content may be used for Gemini/AI training.
The decision that trips people up: blocking training crawlers is a reasonable content-rights choice, but blocking live-retrieval crawlers can remove you from AI answers entirely. If PerplexityBot or ChatGPT's search crawler cannot fetch your page, you cannot be cited in their live responses. Many sites accidentally hurt their AI visibility by blocking bots they actually wanted answering questions about them.
Behavior and honesty of these bots vary. Reputable crawlers publish their user-agent strings and IP ranges and respect robots.txt; some scrapers ignore it. Verifying a bot against its published IP ranges (rather than trusting the user-agent alone) is the reliable way to confirm identity.
The block-too-much mistake
How to control AI crawlers
Control happens mainly in robots.txt, using per-user-agent rules. You can allow live-retrieval bots (so you stay eligible for citations) while disallowing training bots (if you want your content excluded from model training) — the two are separate user agents, so you are not forced into all-or-nothing. Our free robots.txt generator includes templates for the common AI crawlers.
A few practical rules. Decide your goal first: maximum AI visibility means allowing retrieval bots; content-rights protection means disallowing training bots. Keep the rules current — AI companies add and rename crawlers regularly. And remember robots.txt is a request, not enforcement: well-behaved bots honor it, but it does not stop a determined scraper, for which server-level blocking is required.
Do not confuse AI crawlers with Googlebot. Googlebot still crawls for classic search and AI Overviews; blocking it removes you from Google entirely. AI-specific crawlers are additional bots with their own user agents — manage them deliberately rather than sweeping them in with a blanket rule.
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