What is AI crawler?
A plain-English definition, and the tools that work with it.
An AI crawler is an automated bot that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI company, either to train a model, to build a search index that AI answers cite from, or to read a page live when a user asks about it. Each purpose is a separate bot with its own name in robots.txt.
- The three jobs matter because they have different consequences. Blocking a training bot keeps your content out of future models. Blocking a search-index bot removes you from AI answers that link back to you, which is direct lost traffic.
- OpenAI alone runs three: GPTBot trains models, OAI-SearchBot builds the ChatGPT Search index, and ChatGPT-User fetches a page when someone shares your link. Treating them as one decision is the most common policy mistake.
- Bingbot matters more than its name suggests, because ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot retrieve through Bing's index. Blocking it removes you from those answers even if every OpenAI bot is allowed.
- robots.txt is a request, not a lock. The major operators document compliance, but a CDN can also block AI crawlers at the firewall before robots.txt is ever read.
Tools for AI crawler
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AI Crawler Access Checker
Check whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot and every other AI crawler can read your site. Real RFC 9309 robots.txt matching with the deciding rule quoted, plus Cloudflare default-blocking detection. Free, instant, no signup.
AI Robots.txt Generator
Generate a correct robots.txt policy for every AI crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and 11 more) with per-bot allow/block toggles and a plain-language line on what each choice costs. Free, in your browser.
AI Crawler Log Analyzer
Drop a server access log and see which AI crawlers actually visit: per-bot hit counts, first and last seen, most-fetched pages, status-code health, daily trend, and the pages no AI crawler has ever touched. Parsed in your browser: logs contain visitor IPs and never leave your device.
GigAI GEO Audit
One URL in, one AI-visibility report out: crawler access with Cloudflare detection, JS rendering, citability scored with published methodology, retrieval chunks, answer snippets and schema. Each finding linked to the free tool that fixes it.
AI crawler problems we solve
Hit one of these? Here's the fix.
- ChatGPT and other AI tools can't see my websiteWork through the three causes in order. Access first, rendering second, content last, because fixing content on a page crawlers can't reach changes nothing.
- I don't know whether AI crawlers are actually visiting my siteAllowing a crawler in robots.txt is permission, not proof. Only your logs show whether the crawlers came.
- I don't know whether to allow or block AI crawlersThere's no universally right answer on training, but there is a wrong one: blocking the search bots by accident while trying to block training.
Frequently asked questions
Related terms
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler that collects pages as training data for future models. It is not the bot behind ChatGPT Search results, and blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT's answers. That is a different bot called OAI-SearchBot.
- robots.txtrobots.txt is a plain-text file at a site's root that tells search-engine crawlers which URLs they may or may not crawl. It's used to keep crawlers out of admin, duplicate or low-value areas and to point them at the sitemap, but it controls crawling, not privacy.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a website usable by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI features, so they can crawl it, read it without JavaScript, and quote it as a source. It overlaps with SEO but optimizes for being cited rather than ranked.
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