Weekly report · 2018-W20

The state of AI crawling

Measured on 30,500 reachable domains for the week ending 2018-05-20. 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-W19 · 2018-W21 →

30,500

domains measured

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 30,503	new
CCBot	Common Crawl Foundation	archive	11.1%	3,399 of 30,503	new
Bytespider	ByteDance	training	10.7%	3,271 of 30,503	new
ClaudeBot	Anthropic	training	10.0%	3,041 of 30,503	new
Google-Extended	Google	training	9.0%	2,742 of 30,503	new
Meta-ExternalAgent	Meta	training	9.0%	2,737 of 30,503	new
Amazonbot	Amazon	training	9.0%	2,732 of 30,503	new
Applebot-Extended	Apple	training	8.7%	2,669 of 30,503	new
anthropic-ai	Anthropic	training	4.2%	1,277 of 30,503	new
omgilibot	Webz.io	training	4.2%	1,270 of 30,503	new
Diffbot	Diffbot	training	3.9%	1,175 of 30,503	new
omgili	Webz.io	training	3.8%	1,154 of 30,503	new
cohere-ai	Cohere	live retrieval	3.8%	1,150 of 30,503	new
SemrushBot-OCOB	Semrush	training	3.7%	1,136 of 30,503	new
PerplexityBot	Perplexity	answer index	3.6%	1,104 of 30,503	new
ChatGPT-User	OpenAI	live retrieval	3.6%	1,099 of 30,503	new
FacebookBot	Meta	training	3.2%	991 of 30,503	new
YouBot	You.com	answer index	2.8%	867 of 30,503	new
ImagesiftBot	ImageSift (Hive)	training	2.7%	837 of 30,503	new
Timpibot	Timpi	training	2.7%	834 of 30,503	new
Scrapy	Zyte (open-source framework)	training	2.3%	710 of 30,503	new
OAI-SearchBot	OpenAI	answer index	2.3%	687 of 30,503	new
AI2Bot	Allen Institute for AI	training	2.2%	686 of 30,503	new
cohere-training-data-crawler	Cohere	training	2.0%	597 of 30,503	new
DuckAssistBot	DuckDuckGo	live retrieval	1.7%	529 of 30,503	new
Meta-ExternalFetcher	Meta	live retrieval	1.7%	529 of 30,503	new
PanguBot	Huawei	training	1.7%	518 of 30,503	new
Claude-SearchBot	Anthropic	answer index	1.6%	482 of 30,503	new
Claude-User	Anthropic	live retrieval	1.6%	475 of 30,503	new
Kangaroo Bot	Kangaroo LLM	training	1.5%	460 of 30,503	new
Perplexity-User	Perplexity	live retrieval	1.5%	448 of 30,503	new
MistralAI-User	Mistral AI	live retrieval	1.4%	428 of 30,503	new
Applebot	Apple	answer index	1.2%	355 of 30,503	new
Google-CloudVertexBot	Google	live retrieval	1.2%	353 of 30,503	new
Meta-WebIndexer	Meta	answer index	1.1%	349 of 30,503	new
GoogleOther	Google	training	1.1%	333 of 30,503	new
TikTokSpider	ByteDance	live retrieval	0.8%	255 of 30,503	new
Amzn-SearchBot	Amazon	answer index	0.7%	220 of 30,503	new
Amzn-User	Amazon	live retrieval	0.4%	130 of 30,503	new
MistralAI-Index	Mistral AI	answer index	0.2%	69 of 30,503	new
facebookexternalhit	Meta	live retrieval	0.2%	57 of 30,503	new
MistralAI-Training	Mistral AI	training	0.2%	56 of 30,503	new
Bingbot	Microsoft	answer index	0.1%	41 of 30,503	new
Googlebot-News	Google	answer index	0.1%	38 of 30,503	new
msnbot	Microsoft	answer index	0.1%	26 of 30,503	new
Meta-ExternalAds	Meta	training	0.1%	20 of 30,503	new
Googlebot	Google	answer index	0.1%	16 of 30,503	new
OAI-AdsBot	OpenAI	live retrieval	0.0%	3 of 30,503	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.

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-W20", 2018-05-20. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2018-W20

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