Websites aren’t built just to publish content, and metadata isn’t fine-tuned for fun; it’s all of these activities that work together so your pages can be discovered more easily. For years, Google Search has been the primary gateway to that visibility, thanks largely to its web crawlers.
Since the late 1990s, Googlebot and other traditional crawlers have scanned websites, fetched HTML pages, and indexed them to help people find what they’re looking for. As of January 2024, Google accounted for 63% of all U.S. web traffic, driven by the top 170 domains.
But now, according to a survey by McKinsey, half of customers now turn to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity for instant answers, and even Google is blending AI-generated summaries into search results through features like AI Overviews.
Behind these new AI-driven experiences is a growing class of bots known as AI crawlers. If you run a WordPress site, understanding how these crawlers access and use your content is more important than ever.
What are AI crawlers?
AI crawlers are automated bots that scan publicly accessible web pages, similar to search engine crawlers, but with a different purpose. Instead of indexing pages for traditional ranking, they collect content to train large language models or supply fresh information to AI-generated responses.
Broadly, AI crawlers fall into two groups:
- Training crawlers, such as GPTBot (OpenAI) and ClaudeBot (Anthropic), collect data to teach large language models how to answer questions more accurately.
- Live retrieval crawlers like ChatGPT-User access websites in real time when someone asks something that requires the latest data, like checking a product description or reading documentation.
Other crawlers, PerplexityBot or AmazonBot, for example, are building their own indexes or systems to reduce their dependence on third-party sources. And while their goals differ, they all have one thing in common: they fetch and read content from websites like yours.
How AI crawlers work
When an AI crawler visits your site, it typically does the following:
- Sends a basic GET request to the page’s URL (no interaction, scrolling, or DOM events).
- Fetches only the initial HTML returned by the server. It doesn’t wait for client-side JavaScript to load or execute.
- Extracts all
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