What are the types of AI crawling bots?
AI crawlers have different functions, and their roles sometimes overlap. The three roles are:
- Training → Builds or improves models
- Search / indexing → Finds pages and surfaces them in AI search
- User-action retrieval → Fetches pages in response to a live query
OpenAI's bots have distinct roles:
- GPTBot → Crawls pages only for training
- ChatGPT-User → Fetches pages when a user asks for them
- OAI-SearchBot → Indexes pages for ChatGPT search
- OAI-AdsBot → Checks the landing pages of ChatGPT ads
AI crawl bots organized by purpose
| Bot | Claimed purpose | Practical category | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | Collects content that may be used to train generative AI foundation models | Training | Separate from search and user actions; blocking affects future training use |
| OAI-SearchBot | Surfaces websites in ChatGPT search results | Search | Allowing it supports ChatGPT search visibility; separate from GPTBot |
| ChatGPT-User | Used for certain user actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs | User Action | Not used for automatic crawling or Search eligibility |
| OAI-AdsBot | Visits the landing page of an ad submitted to ChatGPT to check it against OpenAI's policies and judge when the ad is relevant | Ads | Advertisers must allow it to run ChatGPT ads; Cloudflare verifies it |
| ClaudeBot | Collects web content for model training | Training | Distinct from Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User |
| Claude-SearchBot | Crawls the web to improve Claude search results | Search | Separate search/indexing crawler |
| Claude-User | Fetches pages when a Claude user asks a question | User Action | User-initiated retrieval; not a training crawler |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Used for AI indexing/training | Training | Meta’s primary AI crawler |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | User-prompted fetches / direct viewing flows | User Action | Not treated as a crawler in some third-party bot analyses |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Used to improve advertising and products | Ads / analytics | Separate from training and search |
| Googlebot | General Google crawling for search and related indexing | Mixed Purpose | Best treated as search/mixed, not pure training |
| GoogleOther | Additional Google crawling outside the main search crawler | Mixed / Other | Distinct from Googlebot in verified-bot lists |
| Bingbot | Bing crawling for search and related AI surfaces | Mixed Purpose | Best treated as search/mixed, not pure training |
| Amazonbot | Crawls for Amazon search and related discovery | Search | Commonly treated as a search-oriented crawler |
| Applebot | Apple crawling for search/services indexing | Search / Mixed | Not clearly a training-only bot |
| Bytespider | AI-related web crawling used for training | Training | Commonly listed as training-oriented |
| TikTokSpider | User-facing fetch / preview behavior | User Action | More akin to user-triggered retrieval than training |
| PerplexityBot | Crawls for search / answer retrieval | Search | Search-oriented crawler |
| Perplexity-User | Fetches on behalf of a user query | User Action | User-initiated retrieval |
| MistralAI-User | User-requested fetches | User Action | User-triggered browsing |
| PetalBot | Huawei crawler used for AI/search-related purposes | AI Crawler | Often grouped as an AI crawler in verified-bot lists |
| AI2Bot | Research/training crawling | Training | Long-tail training bot |
| CCBot | Web-scale crawl used for training datasets | Training | Widely recognized dataset source |
| Timpibot | Training-oriented crawler | Training | Long-tail training bot |
| Cotoyogi | Training-oriented crawler | Training | Long-tail training bot |
| Diffbot | Extraction/knowledge graph style crawling | Training / extraction | Better treated as data extraction/indexing than a search bot |
| YouBot | Search crawler | Search | Search-oriented crawler |
| Sidetrade | Search/minor crawler | Search | Minor search bot |
| aiHitBot | Search/minor crawler | Search | Minor search bot |
What do we know about training crawler access
Training crawlers collect and process data for model development, fine-tuning, or updates. AI companies' public documentation describes their intent at a high level, but the details of how models weight, retain, and reuse content remain largely a black box.
We don't have clear documentation suggesting that allowing training bots leads to higher visibility, increased citations, or better AI answer results. The relationship between training access and downstream visibility is indirect and hasn't been well quantified. What we do know is:
- Training data contributes to overall model behavior.
- Content use doesn't translate to attribution.
- Systems that retrieve information through search and user actions are separate from model training processes.
Search and indexing crawlers
Search crawlers affect whether your site can appear in AI search products, answer engines, or hybrid search interfaces. They work much like traditional search bots and handle these tasks:
- Discovering pages
- Reading content
- Making that content available to systems that retrieve it
User-action retrieval crawlers
When a user asks a question or an answer engine needs to verify or pull content from a live source, user-action crawlers fetch pages in real time. They run on demand and determine whether your page can be quoted, summarized, or directly referenced in a live response.
Should you block AI crawl bots?
You can usually control these crawlers at two levels:
- robots.txt directives: Allow or disallow specific user agents.
- Network-level filtering: WAF, bot management tools, or CDN rules.
Cloudflare and other platforms have bot management and "bot fight" modes that can automatically challenge or block traffic identified as non-human. Other CDNs and security layers have similar controls.
Be careful flipping a bot control toggle. You may have unintended consequences.
- Training crawler: Blocking one excludes your content from future training runs where the block is respected. It doesn't affect existing models.
- Search crawler: Blocking it reduces or removes your content from that system's discovery layer.
- User-action crawler: Blocking one prevents real-time fetching, which can limit how your content appears in live answers.
Sources
- OpenAI Crawlers overview. developers.openai.com
- OpenAI Help Center publishers and developers FAQ. help.openai.com
- Anthropic privacy article on crawler behavior and blocking. privacy.claude.com
- OpenAI Help Center advertiser guidance for allowing OpenAI web crawlers. help.openai.com
- Meta Web Crawlers documentation. developers.facebook.com
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