Weekly report · 2020-W03
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,585 reachable domains for the week ending 2020-01-19. 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.
30,585
domains measured
7%
block an answer engine
18%
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% | 3,494 of 30,583 | new |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.2% | 3,432 of 30,583 | new |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.8% | 3,298 of 30,583 | new |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 10.0% | 3,067 of 30,583 | new |
| Google-Extended | training | 9.1% | 2,768 of 30,583 | new | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 9.0% | 2,762 of 30,583 | new |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 9.0% | 2,750 of 30,583 | new |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.8% | 2,688 of 30,583 | new |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.2% | 1,293 of 30,583 | new |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.2% | 1,283 of 30,583 | new |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.9% | 1,185 of 30,583 | new |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.8% | 1,165 of 30,583 | new |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.8% | 1,156 of 30,583 | new |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.8% | 1,147 of 30,583 | new |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.7% | 1,118 of 30,583 | new |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.6% | 1,114 of 30,583 | new |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.3% | 996 of 30,583 | new |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.8% | 871 of 30,583 | new |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.8% | 846 of 30,583 | new |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 837 of 30,583 | new |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 717 of 30,583 | new |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.3% | 695 of 30,583 | new |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 687 of 30,583 | new |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 1.9% | 596 of 30,583 | new |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 533 of 30,583 | new |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 530 of 30,583 | new |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 517 of 30,583 | new |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.6% | 482 of 30,583 | new |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.6% | 475 of 30,583 | new |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 459 of 30,583 | new |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.5% | 451 of 30,583 | new |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.4% | 428 of 30,583 | new |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 366 of 30,583 | new |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.2% | 355 of 30,583 | new | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 349 of 30,583 | new |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.1% | 337 of 30,583 | new | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 254 of 30,583 | new |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 217 of 30,583 | new |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 129 of 30,583 | new |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 67 of 30,583 | new |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 56 of 30,583 | new |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 55 of 30,583 | new |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 41 of 30,583 | new |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 39 of 30,583 | new | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 25 of 30,583 | new |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 20 of 30,583 | new |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,583 | new | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 2 of 30,583 | 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, 2020-W03", 2020-01-19. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2020-W03Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.