Weekly report · 2023-W15

The state of AI crawling

Measured on 30,547 reachable domains for the week ending 2023-04-16. 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.

← 2023-W14  ·  2023-W16 →

30,547
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% 3,483 of 30,545 new
CCBot Common Crawl Foundation archive 11.2% 3,422 of 30,545 new
Bytespider ByteDance training 10.8% 3,284 of 30,545 new
ClaudeBot Anthropic training 10.0% 3,055 of 30,545 new
Google-Extended Google training 9.0% 2,756 of 30,545 new
Meta-ExternalAgent Meta training 9.0% 2,752 of 30,545 new
Amazonbot Amazon training 9.0% 2,740 of 30,545 new
Applebot-Extended Apple training 8.8% 2,676 of 30,545 new
anthropic-ai Anthropic training 4.2% 1,291 of 30,545 new
omgilibot Webz.io training 4.2% 1,280 of 30,545 new
Diffbot Diffbot training 3.9% 1,181 of 30,545 new
omgili Webz.io training 3.8% 1,161 of 30,545 new
cohere-ai Cohere live retrieval 3.8% 1,153 of 30,545 new
SemrushBot-OCOB Semrush training 3.8% 1,150 of 30,545 new
PerplexityBot Perplexity answer index 3.7% 1,117 of 30,545 new
ChatGPT-User OpenAI live retrieval 3.6% 1,113 of 30,545 new
FacebookBot Meta training 3.3% 995 of 30,545 new
YouBot You.com answer index 2.8% 869 of 30,545 new
ImagesiftBot ImageSift (Hive) training 2.8% 844 of 30,545 new
Timpibot Timpi training 2.7% 836 of 30,545 new
Scrapy Zyte (open-source framework) training 2.3% 717 of 30,545 new
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI answer index 2.3% 695 of 30,545 new
AI2Bot Allen Institute for AI training 2.2% 686 of 30,545 new
cohere-training-data-crawler Cohere training 2.0% 596 of 30,545 new
DuckAssistBot DuckDuckGo live retrieval 1.7% 533 of 30,545 new
Meta-ExternalFetcher Meta live retrieval 1.7% 531 of 30,545 new
PanguBot Huawei training 1.7% 518 of 30,545 new
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic answer index 1.6% 482 of 30,545 new
Claude-User Anthropic live retrieval 1.6% 474 of 30,545 new
Kangaroo Bot Kangaroo LLM training 1.5% 460 of 30,545 new
Perplexity-User Perplexity live retrieval 1.5% 450 of 30,545 new
MistralAI-User Mistral AI live retrieval 1.4% 428 of 30,545 new
Applebot Apple answer index 1.2% 366 of 30,545 new
Google-CloudVertexBot Google live retrieval 1.2% 357 of 30,545 new
Meta-WebIndexer Meta answer index 1.1% 349 of 30,545 new
GoogleOther Google training 1.1% 337 of 30,545 new
TikTokSpider ByteDance live retrieval 0.8% 254 of 30,545 new
Amzn-SearchBot Amazon answer index 0.7% 217 of 30,545 new
Amzn-User Amazon live retrieval 0.4% 129 of 30,545 new
MistralAI-Index Mistral AI answer index 0.2% 67 of 30,545 new
facebookexternalhit Meta live retrieval 0.2% 57 of 30,545 new
MistralAI-Training Mistral AI training 0.2% 55 of 30,545 new
Bingbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 42 of 30,545 new
Googlebot-News Google answer index 0.1% 39 of 30,545 new
msnbot Microsoft answer index 0.1% 25 of 30,545 new
Meta-ExternalAds Meta training 0.1% 20 of 30,545 new
Googlebot Google answer index 0.1% 16 of 30,545 new
OAI-AdsBot OpenAI live retrieval 0.0% 2 of 30,545 new

Trend share of measured sites

% of sites20151050% of sites08-2208-2809-03block 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=326)17.2%.de (n=834)16.9%.jp (n=419)9.1%.com (n=14980)6.7%.br (n=378)6.1%.org (n=1689)5.2%.net (n=1323)4.1%.ru (n=1173)3.2%.in (n=308)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, 2023-W15", 2023-04-16. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2023-W15

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