How to Identify AI Bots Crawling 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:
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.
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
Depending on how your website is hosted, server logs are stored in different places. Here are the most common locations and methods to access them:
Self-Hosted Servers
Apache (HTTPD)
- Access logs:
/var/log/apache2/access.log(Debian/Ubuntu) or/var/log/httpd/access_log(CentOS/Red Hat)
Nginx
- Access logs:
/var/log/nginx/access.log
Cloud Providers
AWS
- ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) and CloudFront logs → stored in S3 (if enabled)
- EC2 servers → check
/var/log/nginx/or/var/log/httpd/
Google Cloud (GCP)
- Available via Cloud Logging (Stackdriver) in the console
Azure
- Application Gateway and App Service logs → available in Azure Monitor / Log Analytics
Containers & Orchestration
Docker
- Run:
docker logs <container_id> - Or check JSON logs at
/var/lib/docker/containers/<container_id>/<container_id>-json.log
Kubernetes
- Run:
kubectl logs <pod_name>
Managed Hosting & Serverless
Vercel
- In your Vercel dashboard open Observability → Edge Requests → Bot Name, see Vercel: Bot activity and crawler insights now in Observability
Cloudflare
- In your Cloudflare dashboard open Security → Bots.
- Make sure Block AI bots is NOT on.
- Open the AI Audit for instant dashboards and CSV exports
Note: You may need to wait 24 hours for the data to appear.
💡 Tip: If you don’t see AI bots in Google Analytics, that’s normal — crawlers usually don’t execute JavaScript. Check your server logs to spot them.
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.txtrules 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.