Overview: All AI crawlers at a glance
Every major AI platform operates its own web crawlers to collect content for training, knowledge updates or real-time search. These crawlers identify themselves via their user agent string and respect robots.txt – but beyond that, they differ significantly in crawl frequency, purpose, transparency and what they actually do with your content.
Core principle for all crawlers: They all respect robots.txt, read only the HTML source without JavaScript rendering (with partial exceptions) and prefer technically clean, fast websites. The differences lie in crawl frequency, purpose, whether they link back to your site and the degree of transparency each provider offers.
As of 2026, eight major AI crawlers are actively indexing the web. Understanding each one lets you make informed decisions about who gets access to your content – and who doesn't.
GPTBot – ChatGPT (OpenAI)
OpenAI
GPTBot
User agent...