Weekly report · 2021-W44
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,556 reachable domains for the week ending 2021-11-07. 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.
30,556
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% | 3,486 of 30,553 | new |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.2% | 3,424 of 30,553 | new |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.8% | 3,288 of 30,553 | new |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 10.0% | 3,058 of 30,553 | new |
| Google-Extended | training | 9.0% | 2,757 of 30,553 | new | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 9.0% | 2,755 of 30,553 | new |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 9.0% | 2,742 of 30,553 | new |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.8% | 2,678 of 30,553 | new |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.2% | 1,292 of 30,553 | new |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.2% | 1,280 of 30,553 | new |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.9% | 1,182 of 30,553 | new |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.8% | 1,162 of 30,553 | new |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.8% | 1,153 of 30,553 | new |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.8% | 1,148 of 30,553 | new |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.7% | 1,116 of 30,553 | new |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.6% | 1,113 of 30,553 | new |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.3% | 996 of 30,553 | new |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.8% | 869 of 30,553 | new |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.8% | 844 of 30,553 | new |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 837 of 30,553 | new |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 717 of 30,553 | new |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.3% | 695 of 30,553 | new |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 686 of 30,553 | new |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 2.0% | 596 of 30,553 | new |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 533 of 30,553 | new |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 531 of 30,553 | new |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 518 of 30,553 | new |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.6% | 482 of 30,553 | new |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.6% | 474 of 30,553 | new |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 460 of 30,553 | new |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.5% | 450 of 30,553 | new |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.4% | 428 of 30,553 | new |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 365 of 30,553 | new |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.2% | 357 of 30,553 | new | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 349 of 30,553 | new |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.1% | 337 of 30,553 | new | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 254 of 30,553 | new |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 217 of 30,553 | new |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 129 of 30,553 | new |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 67 of 30,553 | new |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 57 of 30,553 | new |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 55 of 30,553 | new |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 42 of 30,553 | new |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 39 of 30,553 | new | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 25 of 30,553 | new |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 20 of 30,553 | new |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,553 | new | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 2 of 30,553 | 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, 2021-W44", 2021-11-07. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2021-W44Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.