In one sentence
An AI crawler is a bot run by an AI company that fetches web pages for model training, search indexing, or to answer a specific user request.
What it means
Not all AI crawlers do the same job. Some collect training data. Some build a search index that an assistant queries. Some fetch a page on the spot because a user asked about it. Vendors often run a separate user agent for each, and they can be allowed or blocked separately in robots.txt.
Blocking the wrong one has consequences. Blocking a search crawler can remove you from that assistant's live answers. Blocking a training crawler affects future models and not current retrieval.
What to do about it
Decide per purpose. Read each vendor's current documentation, because user agents change. Then test what is actually reachable with the AI crawler access checker, since a CDN or firewall rule can block bots that robots.txt allows. Named examples: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
Revisit the decision each quarter. Vendors add and rename agents, and a rule written last year may now block something you want, or allow something you do not.
How Pineprompt measures it
The AI crawler access checker tests whether a site is reachable for the main AI user agents. Pineprompt then shows whether your visibility follows.
Frequently asked
- What is AI Crawler?
- An AI crawler is a bot run by an AI company that fetches web pages for model training, search indexing, or to answer a specific user request.
- How does Pineprompt measure AI Crawler?
- The AI crawler access checker tests whether a site is reachable for the main AI user agents. Pineprompt then shows whether your visibility follows.