Weekly report · 2020-W09
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,583 reachable domains for the week ending 2020-03-01. 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.
30,583
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% | 3,493 of 30,580 | new |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.2% | 3,431 of 30,580 | new |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.8% | 3,295 of 30,580 | new |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 10.0% | 3,065 of 30,580 | new |
| Google-Extended | training | 9.0% | 2,766 of 30,580 | new | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 9.0% | 2,761 of 30,580 | new |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 9.0% | 2,748 of 30,580 | new |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.8% | 2,686 of 30,580 | new |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.2% | 1,292 of 30,580 | new |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.2% | 1,281 of 30,580 | new |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.9% | 1,183 of 30,580 | new |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.8% | 1,163 of 30,580 | new |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.8% | 1,154 of 30,580 | new |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.8% | 1,147 of 30,580 | new |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.7% | 1,117 of 30,580 | new |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.6% | 1,113 of 30,580 | new |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.3% | 995 of 30,580 | new |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.8% | 870 of 30,580 | new |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.8% | 844 of 30,580 | new |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 837 of 30,580 | new |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 718 of 30,580 | new |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.3% | 695 of 30,580 | new |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 686 of 30,580 | new |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 1.9% | 595 of 30,580 | new |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 533 of 30,580 | new |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 530 of 30,580 | new |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 517 of 30,580 | new |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.6% | 482 of 30,580 | new |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.6% | 475 of 30,580 | new |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 459 of 30,580 | new |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.5% | 451 of 30,580 | new |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.4% | 428 of 30,580 | new |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 365 of 30,580 | new |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.2% | 355 of 30,580 | new | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 349 of 30,580 | new |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.1% | 337 of 30,580 | new | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 254 of 30,580 | new |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 217 of 30,580 | new |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 129 of 30,580 | new |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 67 of 30,580 | new |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 56 of 30,580 | new |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 55 of 30,580 | new |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 41 of 30,580 | new |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 39 of 30,580 | new | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 25 of 30,580 | new |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 20 of 30,580 | new |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,580 | new | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 2 of 30,580 | 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-W09", 2020-03-01. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2020-W09Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.