Weekly report · 2019-W17

The state of AI crawling

Measured on 30,515 reachable domains for the week ending 2019-04-28. 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.

← 2019-W16  ·  2019-W18 →

30,515
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 11.4% 3,477 of 30,513 new
CCBot Common Crawl Foundation archive 11.2% 3,412 of 30,513 new
Bytespider ByteDance training 10.8% 3,281 of 30,513 new
ClaudeBot Anthropic training 10.0% 3,051 of 30,513 new
Google-Extended Google training 9.0% 2,751 of 30,513 new
Meta-ExternalAgent Meta training 9.0% 2,747 of 30,513 new
Amazonbot Amazon training 9.0% 2,742 of 30,513 new
Applebot-Extended Apple training 8.8% 2,678 of 30,513 new
anthropic-ai Anthropic training 4.2% 1,281 of 30,513 new
omgilibot Webz.io training 4.2% 1,274 of 30,513 new
Diffbot Diffbot training 3.9% 1,178 of 30,513 new
omgili Webz.io training 3.8% 1,157 of 30,513 new
cohere-ai Cohere live retrieval 3.8% 1,150 of 30,513 new
SemrushBot-OCOB Semrush training 3.7% 1,138 of 30,513 new
PerplexityBot Perplexity answer index 3.6% 1,110 of 30,513 new
ChatGPT-User OpenAI live retrieval 3.6% 1,101 of 30,513 new
FacebookBot Meta training 3.3% 994 of 30,513 new
YouBot You.com answer index 2.9% 870 of 30,513 new
ImagesiftBot ImageSift (Hive) training 2.8% 840 of 30,513 new
Timpibot Timpi training 2.7% 833 of 30,513 new
Scrapy Zyte (open-source framework) training 2.3% 711 of 30,513 new
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI answer index 2.3% 688 of 30,513 new
AI2Bot Allen Institute for AI training 2.2% 684 of 30,513 new
cohere-training-data-crawler Cohere training 1.9% 595 of 30,513 new
DuckAssistBot DuckDuckGo live retrieval 1.7% 531 of 30,513 new
Meta-ExternalFetcher Meta live retrieval 1.7% 529 of 30,513 new
PanguBot Huawei training 1.7% 517 of 30,513 new
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic answer index 1.6% 482 of 30,513 new
Claude-User Anthropic live retrieval 1.6% 475 of 30,513 new
Kangaroo Bot Kangaroo LLM training 1.5% 459 of 30,513 new
Perplexity-User Perplexity live retrieval 1.5% 448 of 30,513 new
MistralAI-User Mistral AI live retrieval 1.4% 427 of 30,513 new
Applebot Apple answer index 1.2% 356 of 30,513 new
Google-CloudVertexBot Google live retrieval 1.2% 353 of 30,513 new
Meta-WebIndexer Meta answer index 1.1% 350 of 30,513 new
GoogleOther Google training 1.1% 334 of 30,513 new
TikTokSpider ByteDance live retrieval 0.8% 253 of 30,513 new
Amzn-SearchBot Amazon answer index 0.7% 220 of 30,513 new
Amzn-User Amazon live retrieval 0.4% 130 of 30,513 new
MistralAI-Index Mistral AI answer index 0.2% 67 of 30,513 new
facebookexternalhit Meta live retrieval 0.2% 57 of 30,513 new
MistralAI-Training Mistral AI training 0.2% 55 of 30,513 new
Bingbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 40 of 30,513 new
Googlebot-News Google answer index 0.1% 38 of 30,513 new
msnbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 25 of 30,513 new
Meta-ExternalAds Meta training 0.1% 20 of 30,513 new
Googlebot Google answer index 0.1% 16 of 30,513 new
OAI-AdsBot OpenAI live retrieval 0.0% 2 of 30,513 new

Trend share of measured sites

% of sites20151050% of sites08-2208-3009-08block 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=453)17.2%.fr (n=325)17.2%.de (n=838)16.5%.jp (n=421)9%.com (n=14988)6.6%.br (n=380)6.1%.org (n=1684)5.2%.net (n=1325)4.2%.ru (n=1166)3%.in (n=305)2.6%.edu (n=478)2.3%.io (n=658)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, 2019-W17", 2019-04-28. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2019-W17

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