How often are AI crawlers hitting your site? What are you seeing in logs?

Your patterns sound about right. Here’s what I’ve seen across multiple sites:

Typical crawl frequencies:

Factors affecting frequency:

1. Site authority - Higher authority = more crawling
2. Update frequency - Sites with fresh content get crawled more
3. Content volume - More pages = more total crawl activity
4. Robots.txt - Restrictive rules reduce crawling

Does it matter?

More crawling = fresher content in AI = potentially more citations. But it’s not the only factor. You can be crawled weekly and never cited if your content doesn’t match queries.

Large publisher perspective (millions of monthly visitors):

What we see:

• GPTBot: Multiple times daily, hitting different sections
• PerplexityBot: Constant, hundreds of requests per hour
• ClaudeBot: Several times weekly
• Various other AI bots we don’t recognize

Our crawl budget is significant.

We actually had to rate-limit some AI bots because they were hitting us too aggressively and affecting performance.

The correlation:

More crawling does seem to correlate with more AI citations. But for us, the challenge is managing the crawl load, not encouraging more of it.

If you’re a smaller site wanting more AI crawls, focus on:

• Regular content updates
• Clear site structure
• No robots.txt blocking
• Fast response times

Log analysis perspective:

What to look for in logs:

User agent strings:

• “GPTBot” - OpenAI
• “PerplexityBot” - Perplexity
• “ClaudeBot” or “Claude-Web” - Anthropic
• “Google-Extended” - Google AI training
• “CCBot” - Common Crawl (used by many AI companies)

Tracking tips:

1. Set up log parsing for these user agents
2. Track crawl frequency over time
3. Note which pages get crawled most
4. Compare patterns to content updates

What we learned:

Pages that get crawled frequently tend to be our highest-authority content. The bots seem to prioritize content that performs well in traditional search.

Small business site perspective:

Our reality:

• We get maybe 1-2 GPTBot visits per month
• PerplexityBot is more active, maybe weekly
• We’re not a priority for AI crawlers

Does it matter?

We still appear in AI responses for our niche. Even infrequent crawling can be enough if your content is relevant and there’s limited competition.

My take:

Don’t obsess over crawl frequency if you’re a smaller site. Focus on content quality. AI systems can work with content they’ve crawled once, they don’t need constant recrawling for most purposes.

Security perspective:

Verify the bots are real.

Some scrapers and bad actors spoof AI bot user agents. Before drawing conclusions from log data:

1. Check if requests come from expected IP ranges
2. Look for abnormal request patterns
3. Verify behavior matches expected bot behavior

OpenAI publishes GPTBot IP ranges. Perplexity has verification methods too.

Don’t assume every “GPTBot” in your logs is actually OpenAI.

Good discussion. Here’s what I’m taking away:

Normal crawl patterns:

• GPTBot: Monthly for smaller sites, more frequent for larger
• PerplexityBot: More aggressive, weekly to daily
• Others vary but generally less frequent

What affects frequency:

• Site authority and traffic
• Content update frequency
• Technical health (speed, structure)
• Robots.txt permissions

What I’m going to do:

1. Verify our robots.txt allows all AI bots
2. Set up proper log parsing for AI user agents
3. Track patterns over time
4. Focus on content quality rather than obsessing over crawl frequency
5. Monitor actual AI citations with Am I Cited (crawling =/= citing)

Key insight:

Being crawled is necessary but not sufficient. More crawling doesn’t guarantee more citations. The content still needs to be good and match what people ask.

Thanks for the data points everyone.

Looking ahead: AI crawling is becoming more sophisticated.

Future AI bots will likely:

• Be more selective about what to crawl
• Use signals about content quality
• Coordinate with other discovery methods

Implication:

Raw crawl frequency may matter less over time. Quality signals will matter more. Focus on being worth crawling, not just being crawlable.