AI Crawler

What Are AI Crawlers?

For website owners, a strategic question arises: should AI crawlers be allowed or blocked in the robots.txt? If you want to be cited in AI answers, you should explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. An llms.txt file can additionally give AI systems a machine-readable overview of your website. Monitor your server logs to see which AI crawlers visit your site — that shows which systems are potentially using your content.

AI crawlers are automated bots deployed by AI companies to capture website content and make it usable for their systems. Well-known AI crawlers include GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended (Google). Similar to how Googlebot crawls pages for the search index, AI crawlers scan the web to collect content for training Large Language Models or for RAG-based real-time searches.

For website owners, a strategic question arises: should AI crawlers be allowed or blocked? Anyone seeking to be cited in AI answers — that is, aiming for AI visibility — should explicitly allow AI crawlers in the robots.txt. Blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot means these systems cannot use your content as a source. On the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about copyright and data usage that can justify blocking.

In practice, a differentiated approach is recommended: allow AI crawlers for your public, citable content (blog, glossary, specialist pages), and block them if necessary for protected areas. Supplement your website with an llms.txt file — an emerging format that gives AI systems a machine-readable overview of your website. Monitor your server logs to see which AI crawlers visit your site, to get a picture of which systems are potentially using your content.