What is AI Crawlers?

AI crawlers are web-scraping bots run by AI companies to index content for their search and training systems. The major ones are GPTBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), ClaudeBot and anthropic-ai (Anthropic), Google-Extended (Google's AI training crawler), and Bingbot (Microsoft, which powers Copilot citations).

These crawlers behave similarly to Googlebot — they follow links, read HTML, parse structured data, and respect robots.txt directives. However, their purpose is different. While Googlebot builds a search index for ranking pages, AI crawlers build knowledge bases for generating answers. A page that is blocked from AI crawlers cannot be cited in AI search results, regardless of how well it ranks on Google.

Managing AI crawler access is a key GEO decision. Blocking all AI bots (via robots.txt) means your content will not appear in AI-generated answers. Allowing them means your content can be cited but also used for training. Most businesses focused on visibility should allow AI crawlers — the default User-Agent: * Allow: / covers most of them, but being explicit in your robots.txt signals intentional AI accessibility.