What Is an AI Crawler?
An AI crawler is a bot that fetches website content specifically to train AI models or to power real-time AI-generated answers, rather than to build a traditional search index.
Common AI Crawlers
Major AI crawlers include OpenAI’s GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (search), Anthropic’s ClaudeBot, Perplexity’s PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended (which controls whether content can be used to train Google’s AI models, separate from Googlebot’s standard indexing).
AI Crawlers vs Traditional Search Crawlers
Googlebot and Bingbot exist to build a search index for ranking pages in results. AI crawlers exist to gather content either for model training or to answer a specific AI query in real time — a distinction that matters practically, since site owners can now choose to block AI training crawlers while still allowing AI search crawlers (or vice versa) via separate robots.txt directives, something not possible with a single blanket rule under the older search-only crawler model.
