AI Crawler
An AI crawler is a bot that visits websites and downloads their pages for an AI company. Cloudflare, which sells tools for managing bots, says what these crawlers collect goes to two uses: training large language models, the AI behind tools like ChatGPT, and helping build the answers those tools give. Website owners can allow or block them.
Source: Cloudflare Learning Center, How to block AI crawlers, checked October 29, 2026
What AI Crawler means for your business
AI companies run more than one crawler, and each does a different job. OpenAI's crawler page lists GPTBot for training, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT's search results, and ChatGPT-User, which may visit a page when someone asks ChatGPT a question. Anthropic splits its bots the same way, with ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User.
That's why blocking "AI bots" as one group can cost you more than you meant to give up. OpenAI says each setting is independent, so a site can allow its search crawler and block its training crawler. Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot keeps your content out of its search index. We'd decide on training as its own question.
The block isn't always in your robots.txt file. Security settings at your web host or CDN, the service that delivers your pages, can turn bots away too. Cloudflare also says some AI crawlers ignore robots.txt. We'd check both places, and your server logs, before guessing.
If AI tools seem to skip your site and you can't tell why, making your site readable to AI search starts with this check.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview split AI crawlers into training, live lookups and AI search, citing bot-security and crawler company blogs, Cloudflare and YouTube. ChatGPT gave a similar definition with GPTBot and ClaudeBot as examples and cited no sources.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in crawlers and technical access
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