Weekly report · 2019-W01
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,507 reachable domains for the week ending 2019-01-06. 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.
30,507
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% | 3,471 of 30,509 | new |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.2% | 3,406 of 30,509 | new |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.7% | 3,276 of 30,509 | new |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 10.0% | 3,047 of 30,509 | new |
| Google-Extended | training | 9.0% | 2,747 of 30,509 | new | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 9.0% | 2,744 of 30,509 | new |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 9.0% | 2,738 of 30,509 | new |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.8% | 2,675 of 30,509 | new |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.2% | 1,279 of 30,509 | new |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.2% | 1,273 of 30,509 | new |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.9% | 1,178 of 30,509 | new |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.8% | 1,157 of 30,509 | new |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.8% | 1,148 of 30,509 | new |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.7% | 1,137 of 30,509 | new |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.6% | 1,108 of 30,509 | new |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.6% | 1,101 of 30,509 | new |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.3% | 994 of 30,509 | new |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.9% | 870 of 30,509 | new |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.8% | 841 of 30,509 | new |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 835 of 30,509 | new |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 710 of 30,509 | new |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.3% | 688 of 30,509 | new |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 686 of 30,509 | new |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 2.0% | 597 of 30,509 | new |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 530 of 30,509 | new |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 529 of 30,509 | new |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 519 of 30,509 | new |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.6% | 482 of 30,509 | new |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.6% | 475 of 30,509 | new |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 460 of 30,509 | new |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.5% | 448 of 30,509 | new |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.4% | 428 of 30,509 | new |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 355 of 30,509 | new |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.2% | 354 of 30,509 | new | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 350 of 30,509 | new |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.1% | 334 of 30,509 | new | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 255 of 30,509 | new |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 220 of 30,509 | new |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 130 of 30,509 | new |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 68 of 30,509 | new |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 57 of 30,509 | new |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 55 of 30,509 | new |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 40 of 30,509 | new |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 38 of 30,509 | new | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 25 of 30,509 | new |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 20 of 30,509 | new |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,509 | new | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 2 of 30,509 | 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, 2019-W01", 2019-01-06. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2019-W01
Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.