AI Crawler
AEOeye editorial team · AEO Glossary
A bot that fetches web content to feed AI systems — for training, live retrieval, or both — such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
AI crawlers are the bots that let AI assistants read the web. Some gather data to train models; others fetch pages in real time to answer a live question. Whether these bots can reach your content directly affects whether AI engines can mention and cite you.
You control AI crawler access through robots.txt and, increasingly, an llms.txt file. The strategic question isn't just whether Googlebot can see you anymore — it's whether the specific AI crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini can too.
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