What is anAI crawler?
Not every AI crawler wants the same thing, and that is where your room to decide comes from.
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Check your AI visibility or call: +49 151 1576 5566AI crawlers are automated programs that AI providers use to fetch publicly accessible web pages. Technically they work like Googlebot and identify themselves by name, which lets you give each one its own rules in robots.txt. What matters is their purpose, because the major providers run training, search and user-triggered fetches through separate crawlers.
- Training crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot gather material for future models.
- Search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot decide whether you show up in AI search.
- ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User fetch pages when someone asks for them in a chat.
- Firewalls and bot protection often block AI crawlers without robots.txt showing it.
Which AI crawlers exist and which ones count for your visibility
OpenAI runs GPTBot for training, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and ChatGPT-User for fetches from the chat. Anthropic uses the same split with ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User. Perplexity says it runs no training crawler at all: PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its search results, alongside Perplexity-User. Google-Extended, finally, is not a crawler but a token that governs use by Gemini.
For being named in AI answers, the search crawlers count. You can block the training crawlers without disappearing there.
How to manage AI crawlers and still get named in AI answers
There are really two questions. May your content flow into future models, and do you want to appear as a source in AI search? Because the providers run separate crawlers, you can answer both independently, for example by blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended while allowing OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
robots.txt stays a request, though. OpenAI says its rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User, and Perplexity says Perplexity-User generally ignores the file, because both fetches are triggered by people. Whether a crawler reaches your site at all is also decided by your firewall and hosting. In our survey on 26 Sep 2026, none of 22 small and mid-sized business websites blocked the search crawlers in robots.txt, so if a service is not fetching your pages, the cause usually sits in the technology behind the file.
Frequently asked questions
How do AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot interact with websites?
Like Googlebot: they request pages, read the content and identify themselves with their own name. Both are training crawlers, so blocking them does not remove you from ChatGPT or Claude search.
What changes do I need to make to robots.txt for AI crawlers?
Give each crawler its own group with its exact name. If you keep general blocks under User-agent: *, repeat them in every named group, because a crawler follows only the group that matches it most precisely.
Why should we care about GPTBot and ClaudeBot crawling?
Because they decide whether your content may be used for training, separately from your visibility in AI search. You can say no to the first and still be found.
Where to go deeper
AI Crawlers in robots.txt: Managing GPTBot and Co.
AI SEO: What Changes Compared to Traditional SEO
Terms you should know in the same context
GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · Google-Extended · llms.txt · AI visibility · Back to the AI glossary A to Z
Once you sort AI crawlers by purpose, you no longer have to choose between protection and visibility.