DeepLexa

Technical

AI Crawler

Short answer

An AI crawler is an automated bot operated by an AI company, such as OpenAI's GPTBot or PerplexityBot, that fetches web content to power training data or live retrieval for answer engines.

AI crawlers are the bots that feed the models. Some gather content for training future models; others fetch pages in real time to ground answers at query time. Whether these crawlers can access your site directly affects whether your content can ever appear in AI answers.

Managing AI crawler access is now part of technical AEO. Blocking them, intentionally or via misconfigured robots rules, cuts you out of retrieval; allowing and guiding them, including via files like llms.txt, supports visibility. Some tools also track AI crawler activity as an early indicator of how models are engaging with a site.

DeepLexa recommends ensuring AI crawlers can access your pages as part of making your content retrievable and citable.

How DeepLexa helps

DeepLexa flags crawler-access problems that quietly keep your content out of AI answers, then tells you how to fix them.

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Related terms

RetrievabilityRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)llms.txtAI Referral TrafficGrounding

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