AI Crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)

Name: Higglo
Price range: $$$

The automated agents that AI companies use to read the web for training and live retrieval — including GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended — governed by robots.txt and, increasingly, llms.txt.

Also known as: GPTBot · ClaudeBot · PerplexityBot · AI bots

Definition

In more depth.

AI crawlers are the bots that fetch web pages on behalf of AI systems, either to build training corpora or to retrieve live content at answer time. The major named agents include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Google's AI products), and Applebot-Extended (Apple Intelligence).

A site controls their access through robots.txt user-agent rules and can offer them a curated reading list via llms.txt. For a brand that wants to be represented accurately in AI answers, the decision is usually to explicitly allow the reputable crawlers and give them clean, structured content to read — the opposite of the reflex to block everything.

Frequently asked

AI Crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) — FAQ.

Should we block AI crawlers?

Usually no. Blocking reputable crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot removes you from the answers your prospects are increasingly getting from AI. The stronger move for most brands is to allow them and give them clean, structured, citable content.

How do you control which AI crawlers can access your site?

Through per-user-agent rules in robots.txt (allow or disallow specific bots) and, optionally, an llms.txt file that points them to the pages you most want cited.

Sources

Where these claims come from.

The /llms.txt proposal· accessed 2026-07-05
Higglo · llms.txt· accessed 2026-07-05

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