Understanding Web Crawlers: Strategies for Traditional and AI Search Bots

October 24, 2024

Morgan McMurray
Content Writer

Web crawlers have always played a key role in determining the visibility of your site on traditional search engines. But a new wave of AI crawlers is changing how web content is ingested and applied by large language models (LLMs).

Understanding the differences between both types of crawlers — and strategizing accordingly — will soon be essential for remaining competitive in this new era of search.

Web crawlers for search: indexing bots vs AI bots

Web crawlers for indexing

Crawlers like our old friends Googlebot and Bingbot are how search engines discover and catalog web content. These crawlers navigate website links and store information in their indexes, ultimately determining what appears in traditional search results. The efficiency and accuracy with which your site is crawled and indexed play a significant role in your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).

The most well-known and most active search engine and indexation crawlers include familiar names:

1. GoogleBot
2. BingBot
3. YandexBot
4. Google Images
5. Applebot

Web crawlers for training AI models

As AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, and Perplexity gain prominence, a new type of web crawler has emerged: “AI crawlers,” or bots focused on gathering data to train these LLMs.

Unlike traditional indexing crawlers, these bots don’t index content for search engines, but rather use the content they crawl to train LLMs and improve each model’s ability to generate human-like responses.

Some of the most active and verified (transparent) AI crawlers right now include:

1. Amazonbot
2. GoogleOther
3. GPTBot (OpenAI)
4. PetalBot (Huawei)

For brands that want to optimize for answer engines, content can’t simply be searchable, but must also be suitable contextually for training AI models, which in turn may generate summaries or answers based on your material.

Do you want AI crawlers accessing your site?

While optimizing for indexation crawlers is table stakes for all organic visibility, AI training crawlers can help your content appear in both answer engines as well as the next wave of generative search results. Having your content referenced in AI-generated answers has the potential to enhance your brand’s visibility beyond traditional search rankings, allowing users to engage with your material through AI-driven tools. However, these AI tools also present new challenges:

• Generative AI can’t always include citations: Tools that are connected to search engine APIs, like Perplexity, can provide specific sources for generated text. Other tools may not have that ability.
• Not all AI crawlers are transparent: Companies with bots that scrape content to train LLMs don’t always disclose what those bots are doing, or even what they are. Some don’t even respect robots.txt guidelines.
• Reducing click-through rate: You might worry that AI summaries could reduce the need for readers to visit your site, diminishing ad revenue. More so than clicks, the KPIs for genAI answers should focus more on brand awareness.
• Impact will vary across verticals: Retailers and large e-commerce sites may see less disruption from AI models, since consumers still need to visit the actual sites to complete purchases. Publishers, on the other hand, need to weigh the benefit of brand visibility with potential negative impact to traffic.

At the end of the day, your website has to be crawlable to be indexed and rendered successfully across all platforms, including Google, Bing, and Bing API-powered AI services like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Whether or not you choose to strategize for, or to allow, AI crawlers will be determined by your specific brand goals.

Monitoring, measuring, and controlling crawler activity

Understanding how bots interact with your site can clue you in to technical issues and inform your optimization strategies by showing you what content bots are accessing (or not reaching), and how often.

A couple methods for this analysis include:

• Log file analysis: Segmenting and parsing your log files will show you which crawlers access your site, how frequently they visit, and what pages they prioritize.
• Tracking crawler-specific metrics: KPIs to monitor include crawl frequency, crawl depth (how many layers of your site are being crawled), and crawl budget (the number of pages crawled in a given time frame.)

Use LogAnalyzer within Botify Analytics

Botify's LogAnalyzer automates log collection and segmentation, and offers detailed insights into how different crawlers interact with your site. This data allows you to detect issues early, make the most of crawl budgets, and make informed decisions about how to manage both indexing and AI crawlers like GPTBot effectively.

Optimizing for each crawler

Once you know which parts of your site crawlers are accessing, you can adjust your strategies to meet your visibility goals. Regardless of crawler type, you’ll want to consider:

• Page accessibility: Ensure that your freshest content and most important pages are being crawled and indexed by prioritizing them in your site’s architecture and internal linking. Identify low-priority pages that may be wasting crawl budget and update accordingly.
• Content exposure: You might not need, or want, all of your content to be accessible to crawlers. Use robots.txt files, noindex tags, and other restrictions to block sensitive or proprietary content from being accessed by bots.

Optimizing for indexing crawlers

For search indexation bots, continue to focus on the tried-and-true technical elements that ensure your site can be fully indexed:

• Improve crawlability: Use clear internal linking structures and eliminate technical barriers like broken links or orphaned pages.
• Sitemaps: Submit XML sitemaps to search engines to guide crawlers to your most valuable content.
• Incorporate structured data: Leverage schema markup to help search engines better understand and rank your content.
• Improve site speed: Improve page load times to ensure crawlers can efficiently process your site.
• Push your content directly to Bing: If you’re a Botify customer, ask your account manager about our exclusive partnership with Bing to push your content directly to the Bing index. This ensures that your freshest content is found by Bing and immediately available to any AI engines using its index for answers.

Google reps have recently expressed that the tech giant is looking for ways for Googlebot to crawl less. Knowing this, your website should be as streamlined and easy to understand for bots as possible to make sure they reach your most valuable pages.

Using tools like Botify Activation to test and implement technical optimizations, and SpeedWorkers to clean up and cache the content you want crawled, can help streamline these processes, making your site more efficient and appealing to indexing crawlers.

Optimizing for AI training crawlers

The goal of crawlers that feed LLMs is to provide those models with high-quality, contextually rich content. To optimize your site for these tools:

• Improve content quality: Focus on creating well-written, user-centric content that addresses topics in-depth.
• Use formatting: Bulleted and numbered lists can be a great way to break up massive paragraphs of text, and can also be easily referenced in AI-generated answers.
• Comprehensive content: Ensure your content covers a wide range of related topics to give AI bots more context to learn from.

Optimizing for AI answer engines should complement your optimization for indexation, rather than override it. After all, new AI-supported search results and search engines will still need to find your content in order to use it. As we’ve learned from search engines like Google, which have been using natural language processing (NLP) and other machine learning techniques for years, high content quality remains paramount.

Make sure bots find your content

As search engines like Google and Bing shift their focus toward optimizing crawl efficiency, it’s more important than ever to streamline your site to ensure that crawlers prioritize your most valuable content. At the same time, AI training crawlers are increasingly shaping the way users engage with information across the web. By making sure that your content is accessible to both types of crawlers, you should not only increase your visibility in traditional search, but also position your brand to be referenced in generative AI interactions.

To guarantee success, you need a strategy that embraces both traditional and AI-based web crawlers — ensuring your content reaches its full potential across search engines and AI platforms alike.