Weekly report · 2026-W35
The state of AI crawling
Measured on 30,220 reachable domains for the week ending 2026-08-30. 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.
30,220
domains measured
7%
block an answer engine
19%
refuse AI agents at the edge
14%
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% | 3,468 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| CCBot | Common Crawl Foundation | archive | 11.1% | 3,398 of 30,726 | -0.2 pt |
| Bytespider | ByteDance | training | 10.6% | 3,255 of 30,726 | -0.2 pt |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training | 9.9% | 3,037 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Google-Extended | training | 8.9% | 2,741 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt | |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta | training | 8.9% | 2,730 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Amazonbot | Amazon | training | 8.8% | 2,717 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | training | 8.6% | 2,654 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| anthropic-ai | Anthropic | training | 4.1% | 1,268 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| omgilibot | Webz.io | training | 4.1% | 1,248 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Diffbot | Diffbot | training | 3.7% | 1,147 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| omgili | Webz.io | training | 3.7% | 1,137 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| SemrushBot-OCOB | Semrush | training | 3.7% | 1,137 of 30,726 | level |
| cohere-ai | Cohere | live retrieval | 3.7% | 1,125 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | answer index | 3.6% | 1,093 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | live retrieval | 3.5% | 1,088 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| FacebookBot | Meta | training | 3.2% | 981 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| YouBot | You.com | answer index | 2.7% | 843 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| ImagesiftBot | ImageSift (Hive) | training | 2.7% | 829 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Timpibot | Timpi | training | 2.7% | 823 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Scrapy | Zyte (open-source framework) | training | 2.3% | 692 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | answer index | 2.2% | 672 of 30,726 | level |
| AI2Bot | Allen Institute for AI | training | 2.2% | 667 of 30,726 | level |
| cohere-training-data-crawler | Cohere | training | 1.9% | 589 of 30,726 | level |
| DuckAssistBot | DuckDuckGo | live retrieval | 1.7% | 520 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta | live retrieval | 1.7% | 516 of 30,726 | level |
| PanguBot | Huawei | training | 1.7% | 511 of 30,726 | level |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | answer index | 1.5% | 476 of 30,726 | level |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | live retrieval | 1.5% | 461 of 30,726 | level |
| Kangaroo Bot | Kangaroo LLM | training | 1.5% | 455 of 30,726 | level |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | live retrieval | 1.4% | 440 of 30,726 | -0.1 pt |
| MistralAI-User | Mistral AI | live retrieval | 1.3% | 413 of 30,726 | level |
| Applebot | Apple | answer index | 1.2% | 359 of 30,726 | level |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | live retrieval | 1.1% | 350 of 30,726 | level | |
| Meta-WebIndexer | Meta | answer index | 1.1% | 333 of 30,726 | level |
| GoogleOther | training | 1.0% | 316 of 30,726 | level | |
| TikTokSpider | ByteDance | live retrieval | 0.8% | 244 of 30,726 | level |
| Amzn-SearchBot | Amazon | answer index | 0.7% | 206 of 30,726 | level |
| Amzn-User | Amazon | live retrieval | 0.4% | 116 of 30,726 | level |
| MistralAI-Index | Mistral AI | answer index | 0.2% | 68 of 30,726 | level |
| facebookexternalhit | Meta | live retrieval | 0.2% | 59 of 30,726 | level |
| MistralAI-Training | Mistral AI | training | 0.2% | 54 of 30,726 | level |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 46 of 30,726 | level |
| Googlebot-News | answer index | 0.1% | 40 of 30,726 | level | |
| msnbot | Microsoft | answer index | 0.1% | 26 of 30,726 | level |
| Meta-ExternalAds | Meta | training | 0.1% | 19 of 30,726 | level |
| Googlebot | answer index | 0.1% | 16 of 30,726 | level | |
| OAI-AdsBot | OpenAI | live retrieval | 0.0% | 2 of 30,726 | level |
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 200 total
- launchpad.net OAI-SearchBot is no longer refused at the network edge
- launchpad.net ClaudeBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- nature.com OAI-SearchBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- rubiconproject.com ClaudeBot is no longer refused at the network edge
- pubmatic.com GPTBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- pubmatic.com OAI-SearchBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- pubmatic.com ClaudeBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- pubmatic.com PerplexityBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- pubmatic.com Removed its llms.txt file
- forbes.com GPTBot is now answered with HTTP 402
- forbes.com OAI-SearchBot is now answered with HTTP 402
- forbes.com ClaudeBot is now answered with HTTP 402
- forbes.com PerplexityBot is now answered with HTTP 402
- tumblr.com ClaudeBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- tumblr.com PerplexityBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- yahoo.com OAI-SearchBot is no longer refused at the network edge
- bose.com GPTBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- aflamk1.net GPTBot is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net ClaudeBot is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net Google-Extended is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net Applebot-Extended is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net PerplexityBot is now refused at the network edge, whatever robots.txt permits
- aflamk1.net Meta-ExternalAgent is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net Bytespider is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net Amazonbot is now blocked by robots.txt
- aflamk1.net CCBot is now blocked by robots.txt
- vinted.es GPTBot is now blocked by robots.txt
- vinted.es ClaudeBot is now blocked by robots.txt
- vinted.es Google-Extended is now blocked by robots.txt
- vinted.es Amazonbot is now blocked by robots.txt
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-W35", 2026-08-30. https://crawlcensus.com/report/2026-W35Machine-readable: census totals, full corpus, crawler registry. Method: methodology.