How often should AI crawlers be hitting my site? Mine seems way lower than competitors - what increases crawl frequency?

Great that you’re tracking this - most people don’t even know AI crawlers exist separately from Google.

Normal ranges (based on sites I’ve audited):

Your 1,400 requests at DR 52 is on the lower end of medium. There’s room for improvement.

Key insight: AI crawlers are opportunity-based.

They don’t just crawl on a schedule. They crawl pages that:

1. Get cited frequently (creates a feedback loop)
2. Are updated regularly (freshness signals)
3. Have high engagement signals (traffic, links, mentions)
4. Are technically fast and accessible

The crawl-citation loop:

More crawling -> More up-to-date index -> More likely to be cited -> Signals value -> More crawling

Your competitor may be in a virtuous cycle you need to enter.

Technical factors that increase crawl frequency:

1. Page Speed AI crawlers have strict timeout limits. If your pages take 3+ seconds to render, crawlers may give up and deprioritize you. We reduced TTFB from 1.2s to 0.3s and saw GPTBot requests increase 40%.

2. Server-Side Rendering Critical. AI crawlers typically don’t execute JavaScript. If your content is client-side rendered, they see an empty page. Switch to SSR or SSG and watch crawl requests jump.

3. Clean HTML Structure Crawlers parse HTML. Clean, semantic markup is faster to process. We cleaned up our HTML (removed unnecessary divs, fixed validation errors) and saw improved crawl efficiency.

4. No Soft 404s or Errors If crawlers encounter errors on your site, they reduce frequency. Check for 5xx errors, soft 404s, or redirect chains that waste crawl budget.

Quick check: Does your site fully render with JavaScript disabled? If not, AI crawlers see a broken site.

Content freshness is huge for crawl frequency.

Our experiment:

We have two content sections:

• Blog: Updated 2x weekly
• Resources: Static, rarely updated

Crawl frequency difference:

• Blog: 15-20 GPTBot requests per page monthly
• Resources: 2-3 GPTBot requests per page monthly

Same domain, same technical setup, 5-7x difference in crawl frequency.

The implication:

AI crawlers learn your update patterns. If you consistently update certain sections, they’ll crawl those more. If content is stale, they’ll deprioritize.

Actionable tip: Even minor updates (adding a recent example, updating a statistic) signal freshness. We started doing monthly “refresh updates” on key pages and saw crawl frequency increase within weeks.

This is really helpful. Let me check a few things based on your suggestions…

Quick findings from my analysis:

1. Page speed: Our average TTFB is 0.8s - not great but not terrible
2. Rendering: We use Next.js with SSG, so should be fine
3. Crawl distribution: 60% of AI crawler requests go to just 15 pages (out of 200+)
4. Freshness: Our most-crawled pages are ones we update monthly. Least-crawled are static.

The pattern is clear: AI crawlers already know which of our content is valuable. They’re not bothering with the rest.

New question: Is it better to focus on getting MORE pages crawled, or getting the already-crawled pages crawled MORE frequently?

To answer your new question: Both, but prioritize expanding crawled pages first.

Here’s why:

Getting more pages crawled:

• Requires making those pages valuable enough to attract crawlers
• Long-term effort (months)
• May not succeed if content isn’t genuinely citation-worthy

Increasing frequency on already-crawled pages:

• These pages are already proven valuable
• Updates and improvements show results faster
• Creates the virtuous cycle that attracts more crawling overall

My recommendation:

1. Focus on your top 15 most-crawled pages
2. Update them more frequently (bi-weekly instead of monthly)
3. Make them more comprehensive and link to other pages
4. Internal links from high-crawl pages to lower-crawl pages can help spread crawler attention

The rising tide approach: improve your best pages first, then use their authority to lift others.

Don’t overlook sitemap optimization:

Sitemap best practices for AI crawlers:

1. Update lastmod dates accurately - AI crawlers use this to prioritize recrawling
2. Priority tags - While less impactful, they signal relative importance
3. Keep it clean - Remove noindexed or low-value pages
4. Submit to Bing Webmaster - Bing feeds Copilot, and some AI systems check Bing index

Real impact we saw:

We had 500 URLs in our sitemap, including 200 thin blog posts. Removed the thin posts, kept 300 quality pages. AI crawl efficiency improved - same total requests but better distribution.

Your sitemap is literally a menu for crawlers. Don’t serve them junk.

Robots.txt tweaks that can help:

Explicitly allow AI bots:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

Set optimal crawl-delay: Don’t use crawl-delay for AI bots unless you’re getting hammered. Any delay reduces crawl frequency.

Block low-value sections: If you have sections you don’t want AI to cite (admin pages, print versions, etc.), blocking them saves crawl budget for valuable pages.

Important: After making robots.txt changes, request recrawling through Bing Webmaster Tools. Some AI systems pick up changes faster through Bing’s index.

Excellent thread. Here’s my action plan:

Immediate (This Week):

• Clean up robots.txt with explicit AI bot permissions
• Audit sitemap and remove thin/low-value URLs
• Check for any crawl errors in server logs

Short-term (This Month):

• Increase update frequency on top 15 most-crawled pages
• Improve TTFB to under 0.5s
• Add internal links from high-crawl to low-crawl pages

Medium-term (3 Months):

• Create more content similar to our most-crawled pages
• Establish monthly refresh schedule for key content
• Monitor crawl frequency changes with Am I Cited

Key insight: Crawl frequency is an output metric, not an input. You can’t ask for more crawling - you earn it by being worth crawling. Focus on making content valuable and fresh, and crawlers will come.

Thanks everyone - this has been incredibly practical.