Weekly report · 2018-W02

The state of AI crawling

Measured on 30,485 reachable domains for the week ending 2018-01-14. Every figure is the result of an automated audit run the same way on every domain: read robots.txt, resolve the rules for 48 tracked agents, then send live requests as four of them.

← 2018-W01  ·  2018-W03 →

30,485
domains measured
6%
block an answer engine
19%
refuse AI agents at the edge
13%
publish an llms.txt

Block rate by crawler with change on the previous week

CrawlerOperatorContent used forBlock rateSitesWeek on week
GPTBot OpenAI training 11.3% 3,457 of 30,483 new
CCBot Common Crawl Foundation archive 11.1% 3,394 of 30,483 new
Bytespider ByteDance training 10.7% 3,269 of 30,483 new
ClaudeBot Anthropic training 10.0% 3,034 of 30,483 new
Google-Extended Google training 9.0% 2,736 of 30,483 new
Meta-ExternalAgent Meta training 9.0% 2,731 of 30,483 new
Amazonbot Amazon training 8.9% 2,727 of 30,483 new
Applebot-Extended Apple training 8.7% 2,662 of 30,483 new
anthropic-ai Anthropic training 4.2% 1,277 of 30,483 new
omgilibot Webz.io training 4.2% 1,269 of 30,483 new
Diffbot Diffbot training 3.8% 1,173 of 30,483 new
omgili Webz.io training 3.8% 1,153 of 30,483 new
cohere-ai Cohere live retrieval 3.8% 1,149 of 30,483 new
SemrushBot-OCOB Semrush training 3.7% 1,138 of 30,483 new
PerplexityBot Perplexity answer index 3.6% 1,105 of 30,483 new
ChatGPT-User OpenAI live retrieval 3.6% 1,099 of 30,483 new
FacebookBot Meta training 3.2% 990 of 30,483 new
YouBot You.com answer index 2.9% 869 of 30,483 new
ImagesiftBot ImageSift (Hive) training 2.7% 836 of 30,483 new
Timpibot Timpi training 2.7% 834 of 30,483 new
Scrapy Zyte (open-source framework) training 2.3% 711 of 30,483 new
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI answer index 2.3% 687 of 30,483 new
AI2Bot Allen Institute for AI training 2.2% 684 of 30,483 new
cohere-training-data-crawler Cohere training 2.0% 596 of 30,483 new
DuckAssistBot DuckDuckGo live retrieval 1.7% 530 of 30,483 new
Meta-ExternalFetcher Meta live retrieval 1.7% 529 of 30,483 new
PanguBot Huawei training 1.7% 518 of 30,483 new
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic answer index 1.6% 482 of 30,483 new
Claude-User Anthropic live retrieval 1.6% 475 of 30,483 new
Kangaroo Bot Kangaroo LLM training 1.5% 460 of 30,483 new
Perplexity-User Perplexity live retrieval 1.5% 448 of 30,483 new
MistralAI-User Mistral AI live retrieval 1.4% 428 of 30,483 new
Applebot Apple answer index 1.2% 353 of 30,483 new
Google-CloudVertexBot Google live retrieval 1.2% 353 of 30,483 new
Meta-WebIndexer Meta answer index 1.1% 349 of 30,483 new
GoogleOther Google training 1.1% 334 of 30,483 new
TikTokSpider ByteDance live retrieval 0.8% 255 of 30,483 new
Amzn-SearchBot Amazon answer index 0.7% 220 of 30,483 new
Amzn-User Amazon live retrieval 0.4% 130 of 30,483 new
MistralAI-Index Mistral AI answer index 0.2% 69 of 30,483 new
facebookexternalhit Meta live retrieval 0.2% 57 of 30,483 new
MistralAI-Training Mistral AI training 0.2% 56 of 30,483 new
Bingbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 41 of 30,483 new
Googlebot-News Google answer index 0.1% 38 of 30,483 new
msnbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 26 of 30,483 new
Meta-ExternalAds Meta training 0.1% 20 of 30,483 new
Googlebot Google answer index 0.1% 16 of 30,483 new
OAI-AdsBot OpenAI live retrieval 0.0% 3 of 30,483 new

Trend share of measured sites

% of sites20151050% of sites08-2208-3109-09block an answer engineblock a training crawlerpublish llms.txt

Where the blocking is share blocking an answer engine, by top-level domain

bar chart.uk (n=452)17%.fr (n=326)16.9%.de (n=837)16.4%.jp (n=421)9%.com (n=14983)6.6%.br (n=380)6.1%.org (n=1681)5.2%.net (n=1325)4.1%.ru (n=1164)3%.in (n=304)2.6%.edu (n=478)2.3%.io (n=656)1.8%

Only TLDs with at least 40 measured domains are shown, and each bar carries its sample size. A TLD is a weak proxy for jurisdiction. Full segmentation.

Changes recorded this week 0 total

No crawler policy changes were recorded in this week.

Full change log · RSS

Cite this CC BY 4.0

The figures on this page are frozen to the week shown and will not be edited after publication. Corrections are appended, not overwritten.

Crawl Census, "The state of AI crawling, 2018-W02", 2018-01-14. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2018-W02

Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.