Weekly report · 2018-W11
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,501 reachable domains for the week ending 2018-03-18. 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.
30,501
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
| Crawler | Operator | Content used for | Block rate | Sites | Week on week |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | OpenAI | training | 11.4% | 3,463 of 30,498 | new |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.1% | 3,399 of 30,498 | new |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.7% | 3,271 of 30,498 | new |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 10.0% | 3,041 of 30,498 | new |
| Google-Extended | training | 9.0% | 2,742 of 30,498 | new | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 9.0% | 2,736 of 30,498 | new |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 9.0% | 2,731 of 30,498 | new |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.8% | 2,669 of 30,498 | new |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.2% | 1,277 of 30,498 | new |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.2% | 1,270 of 30,498 | new |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.9% | 1,175 of 30,498 | new |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.8% | 1,154 of 30,498 | new |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.8% | 1,150 of 30,498 | new |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.7% | 1,136 of 30,498 | new |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.6% | 1,104 of 30,498 | new |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.6% | 1,099 of 30,498 | new |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.2% | 991 of 30,498 | new |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.8% | 867 of 30,498 | new |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.7% | 837 of 30,498 | new |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 834 of 30,498 | new |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 710 of 30,498 | new |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.3% | 687 of 30,498 | new |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 686 of 30,498 | new |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 2.0% | 597 of 30,498 | new |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 529 of 30,498 | new |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 529 of 30,498 | new |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 518 of 30,498 | new |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.6% | 482 of 30,498 | new |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.6% | 475 of 30,498 | new |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 460 of 30,498 | new |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.5% | 448 of 30,498 | new |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.4% | 428 of 30,498 | new |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 354 of 30,498 | new |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.2% | 353 of 30,498 | new | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 349 of 30,498 | new |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.1% | 333 of 30,498 | new | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 255 of 30,498 | new |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 220 of 30,498 | new |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 130 of 30,498 | new |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 69 of 30,498 | new |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 57 of 30,498 | new |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 56 of 30,498 | new |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 41 of 30,498 | new |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 38 of 30,498 | new | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 26 of 30,498 | new |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 20 of 30,498 | new |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,498 | new | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 3 of 30,498 | new |
Trend share of measured sites
Where the blocking is share blocking an answer engine, by top-level domain
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.
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-W11", 2018-03-18. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2018-W11Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.