The rise of AI has brought new types of web crawlers focused on gathering training data. Let's explore these AI crawlers.
What Are AI Crawlers?
AI crawlers are bots operated by AI companies to collect training data for their language models. Unlike search engine crawlers that index for search, these crawlers gather content for machine learning.
Major AI Crawlers
GPTBot (OpenAI) - User-agent: GPTBot - Purpose: Training data for GPT models - Respects robots.txt
ClaudeBot (Anthropic) - User-agent: ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai - Purpose: Training Claude models - Follows ethical scraping practices
Google-Extended - User-agent: Google-Extended - Purpose: AI/ML training separate from search - Can be blocked independently from Googlebot
Other AI Crawlers - CCBot (Common Crawl) - PerplexityBot - Bytespider (ByteDance)
Controlling AI Crawler Access
You can control access via robots.txt:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /private/User-agent: ClaudeBot Allow: / ```
Ethical Considerations
- Data ownership and copyright
- Opt-in vs opt-out models
- Transparency in data usage
- Revenue sharing discussions