Monitor how AI Search engines access your site through server logs

Why Identifying AI Bots Matters for Your Website

AI search engines and assistants are increasingly relying on web crawlers (bots) to access and index online content. These bots behave similarly to traditional search engine crawlers, but instead of only supporting classic search results, they fuel AI-generated answers in tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Perplexity.

As a site owner, understanding which AI bots are visiting your site can help you:

• Monitor how your content is being accessed and used in AI systems.
• Optimize your website for AI-driven visibility.
• Decide whether to allow or restrict specific crawlers via robots.txt.

Here’s a breakdown of the most important AI bots you’re likely to see in your server logs:

📄 Need help finding your server logs?
Check out our step-by-step guide on how to access server logs across all hosting environments before you continue.

OpenAI Bots

OpenAI operates several bots that power ChatGPT and related services. According to OpenAI’s documentation:

• oai-searchbot Crawls the web to improve search and retrieval capabilities.
• chatgpt-user Represents real user requests to ChatGPT when browsing is enabled.
• gptbot Collects publicly available content to enhance OpenAI’s models.

Google AI Bots

In addition to the familiar Googlebot, Google runs AI-specific crawlers that support products like Bard (now Gemini) and AI Overviews Google crawlers:

• google-extended – Allows site owners to control whether their content is used for AI training.
• gemini-deep-research - Google's AI-powered research bot that performs comprehensive multi-step research on complex topics, analyzing web content to provide detailed insights and answers.

Perplexity Bots

Perplexity uses web crawlers to provide its services as described here Perplexity crawlers:

• perplexitybot – Used by Perplexity AI to fetch and summarize web content (it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models).
• perplexity-user - Represents user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response.

Anthropic Bots

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, also runs crawlers. From Anthropic’s help article:

• claudebot Their main crawler fetching publicly available content to train foundation models.
• claude-user Represents AI user interactions.
• claude-searchbot Is used by Anthropic to index web content for search optimization.

Other AI Bots

A number of other AI companies are actively crawling the web, including Meta:

• meta-externalagent Crawls the web for training AI models or improving Meta products by indexing content directly.

How to Identify AI Bots Crawling Your Website

The most reliable way to identify AI crawlers is by analyzing your server logs. Every request made to your website is recorded there, including visits from bots. By looking at the User-Agent strings in your access logs, you can spot traffic coming from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others. Combining User-Agent data with IP verification gives you a clear picture of which AI systems are interacting with your content and how often.

What a Server Log Entry Looks Like

A server log entry usually contains information such as the IP address, timestamp, requested URL, response status, and the User-Agent (which often reveals whether the request came from a browser or a bot).

Here’s an example of a ChatGPT-User bot request:

<IP address> - - [12/Jun/2025:07:09:59 +0000] “GET <Website URL> HTTP/1.1” 200 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +”

Where to Find Your Server Logs

To identify which AI bots are crawling your site, you’ll need to know where to access your server logs. Because hosting setups vary widely — from shared hosting and managed platforms to cloud, containers, and serverless — the exact location of your logs depends on your infrastructure.

👉 We’ve created a dedicated step-by-step guide that explains exactly where to find your server logs for every major hosting setup. Read the full guide: How to Find Server Logs for Any Website: A Complete Guide for All Hosting Setups.

Why This Matters for Site Owners

Server logs are now one of the best ways to monitor your site’s presence in the AI ecosystem. By checking which bots are crawling your content, you can:

• Measure visibility: Understand where your site may show up in AI-driven answers.
• Control access: Use robots.txt rules to allow or block specific AI bots.
• Stay ahead: Track how quickly new AI systems are interacting with your content.

AI visibility is becoming as important as SEO visibility. Knowing these bots is the first step to taking control of how your website appears in the next generation of search.