AI Search & AI Overviews
AI Crawler
A web crawler used by AI companies to discover and fetch content for training or answering.
CurrentLast updated: 2026-09-16
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Definition
AI Search & AI OverviewsAn AI crawler is a web crawler used by AI companies to discover and fetch web content. AI crawlers (like OpenAI's GPTBot, Google's AI crawlers, or Anthropic's ClaudeBot) gather content for training LLMs and for RAG-based answer generation. Sites can control AI crawler access through robots.txt.
Why it matters
Controlling AI crawler access determines whether your content is available to AI systems for training and answering.
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