Weekly report · 2021-W05

The state of AI crawling

Measured on 30,565 reachable domains for the week ending 2021-02-07. 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.

← 2021-W04  ·  2021-W06 →

30,565
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

CrawlerOperatorContent used forBlock rateSitesWeek on week
GPTBot OpenAI training 11.4% 3,491 of 30,562 new
CCBot Common Crawl Foundation archive 11.2% 3,428 of 30,562 new
Bytespider ByteDance training 10.8% 3,292 of 30,562 new
ClaudeBot Anthropic training 10.0% 3,062 of 30,562 new
Google-Extended Google training 9.0% 2,763 of 30,562 new
Meta-ExternalAgent Meta training 9.0% 2,759 of 30,562 new
Amazonbot Amazon training 9.0% 2,747 of 30,562 new
Applebot-Extended Apple training 8.8% 2,683 of 30,562 new
anthropic-ai Anthropic training 4.2% 1,290 of 30,562 new
omgilibot Webz.io training 4.2% 1,279 of 30,562 new
Diffbot Diffbot training 3.9% 1,181 of 30,562 new
omgili Webz.io training 3.8% 1,161 of 30,562 new
cohere-ai Cohere live retrieval 3.8% 1,152 of 30,562 new
SemrushBot-OCOB Semrush training 3.8% 1,147 of 30,562 new
PerplexityBot Perplexity answer index 3.6% 1,115 of 30,562 new
ChatGPT-User OpenAI live retrieval 3.6% 1,112 of 30,562 new
FacebookBot Meta training 3.3% 994 of 30,562 new
YouBot You.com answer index 2.8% 868 of 30,562 new
ImagesiftBot ImageSift (Hive) training 2.8% 843 of 30,562 new
Timpibot Timpi training 2.7% 835 of 30,562 new
Scrapy Zyte (open-source framework) training 2.3% 716 of 30,562 new
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI answer index 2.3% 694 of 30,562 new
AI2Bot Allen Institute for AI training 2.2% 685 of 30,562 new
cohere-training-data-crawler Cohere training 1.9% 595 of 30,562 new
DuckAssistBot DuckDuckGo live retrieval 1.7% 532 of 30,562 new
Meta-ExternalFetcher Meta live retrieval 1.7% 530 of 30,562 new
PanguBot Huawei training 1.7% 517 of 30,562 new
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic answer index 1.6% 482 of 30,562 new
Claude-User Anthropic live retrieval 1.6% 474 of 30,562 new
Kangaroo Bot Kangaroo LLM training 1.5% 459 of 30,562 new
Perplexity-User Perplexity live retrieval 1.5% 450 of 30,562 new
MistralAI-User Mistral AI live retrieval 1.4% 428 of 30,562 new
Applebot Apple answer index 1.2% 365 of 30,562 new
Google-CloudVertexBot Google live retrieval 1.2% 355 of 30,562 new
Meta-WebIndexer Meta answer index 1.1% 349 of 30,562 new
GoogleOther Google training 1.1% 337 of 30,562 new
TikTokSpider ByteDance live retrieval 0.8% 254 of 30,562 new
Amzn-SearchBot Amazon answer index 0.7% 217 of 30,562 new
Amzn-User Amazon live retrieval 0.4% 129 of 30,562 new
MistralAI-Index Mistral AI answer index 0.2% 67 of 30,562 new
facebookexternalhit Meta live retrieval 0.2% 56 of 30,562 new
MistralAI-Training Mistral AI training 0.2% 55 of 30,562 new
Bingbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 41 of 30,562 new
Googlebot-News Google answer index 0.1% 39 of 30,562 new
msnbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 25 of 30,562 new
Meta-ExternalAds Meta training 0.1% 20 of 30,562 new
Googlebot Google answer index 0.1% 16 of 30,562 new
OAI-AdsBot OpenAI live retrieval 0.0% 2 of 30,562 new

Trend share of measured sites

% of sites20151050% of sites08-2208-2909-06block 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=452)17.3%.fr (n=327)17.1%.de (n=836)16.7%.jp (n=420)9%.com (n=14993)6.7%.br (n=380)6.1%.org (n=1690)5.1%.net (n=1320)4.1%.ru (n=1169)3.2%.in (n=305)2.6%.edu (n=479)2.3%.io (n=661)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, 2021-W05", 2021-02-07. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2021-W05

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