Weekly report · 2026-W20
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,353 reachable domains for the week ending 2026-05-17. 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.
30,353
domains measured
6%
block an answer engine
19%
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 | 11.3% | 3,420 of 30,351 | new |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.0% | 3,345 of 30,351 | new |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.6% | 3,209 of 30,351 | new |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 9.9% | 2,996 of 30,351 | new |
| Google-Extended | training | 8.9% | 2,703 of 30,351 | new | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 8.9% | 2,699 of 30,351 | new |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 8.8% | 2,674 of 30,351 | new |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.6% | 2,624 of 30,351 | new |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.1% | 1,253 of 30,351 | new |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.1% | 1,234 of 30,351 | new |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.7% | 1,137 of 30,351 | new |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.7% | 1,125 of 30,351 | new |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.7% | 1,121 of 30,351 | new |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.7% | 1,119 of 30,351 | new |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.6% | 1,080 of 30,351 | new |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.5% | 1,077 of 30,351 | new |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.2% | 967 of 30,351 | new |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.8% | 836 of 30,351 | new |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.7% | 822 of 30,351 | new |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 816 of 30,351 | new |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 683 of 30,351 | new |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.2% | 665 of 30,351 | new |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 663 of 30,351 | new |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 1.9% | 586 of 30,351 | new |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 515 of 30,351 | new |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 513 of 30,351 | new |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 507 of 30,351 | new |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.6% | 474 of 30,351 | new |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.5% | 459 of 30,351 | new |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 452 of 30,351 | new |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.4% | 438 of 30,351 | new |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.4% | 410 of 30,351 | new |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 355 of 30,351 | new |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.1% | 346 of 30,351 | new | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 332 of 30,351 | new |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.0% | 316 of 30,351 | new | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 244 of 30,351 | new |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 204 of 30,351 | new |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 116 of 30,351 | new |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 68 of 30,351 | new |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 58 of 30,351 | new |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 54 of 30,351 | new |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 44 of 30,351 | new |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 40 of 30,351 | new | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 26 of 30,351 | new |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 19 of 30,351 | new |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,351 | new | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 2 of 30,351 | 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, 2026-W20", 2026-05-17. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2026-W20Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.