technical

AI Crawlers vs Search Engine Crawlers

How AI company crawlers differ from traditional search engine bots and why it matters for your strategy.

AI Crawlers

Bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and others that gather content for AI model training and retrieval systems.

Advantages

  • Index for AI recommendations
  • Focus on content quality
  • Build AI visibility
  • Enable AI citations

Considerations

  • Less transparent behavior
  • Varying crawler policies
  • Newer with less documentation
  • Different access patterns

Search Crawlers

Traditional bots like Googlebot and Bingbot that index content for search engine results.

Advantages

  • Well-documented behavior
  • Clear indexing signals
  • Established best practices
  • Comprehensive tools available

Considerations

  • Doesn't build AI visibility
  • Search-only benefits
  • Increasingly competitive
  • Algorithm dependency

Our Verdict

Allow both types of crawlers access to maximize visibility. Block AI crawlers only if you have specific concerns about AI training.

Where This Applies

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