AI Crawlers Study: How They Crawl and What it Means for Your Site

AI crawlers, also known as web robots or web spiders, are automated programs that crawl the web to gather information.

They are becoming an increasingly important part of the web ecosystem, and understanding how they work can help you ensure your website is accessible to them and that they are indexing your content correctly.

The new research study reveals how ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI crawlers process web content, including JavaScript rendering, assets, and other behavior and patterns with recommendations for website owners, devs, and AI users.

This blog post will explore the key findings from a recent study by MERJ and Vercel on AI crawler behavior.

We will look at the scale and distribution of AI crawler traffic, their JavaScript rendering capabilities, content type priorities, crawling efficiency, and how their behavior can impact your website’s search visibility.

The Rise of AI Crawlers

The study found that AI crawlers are making a significant impact on web traffic.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT generated 569 million requests across Vercel’s network in the past month, while Anthropic’s Claude followed with 370 million.

This combined volume represents about 20% of Googlebot’s traffic during the same period.

While AI crawlers haven’t reached Googlebot’s scale yet, they are a significant portion of web crawler traffic.

This trend is likely to continue as AI technology continues to develop.

How AI Crawlers Differ From Traditional Search Engines

One of the key differences between AI crawlers and traditional search engines is their ability to render JavaScript.

The study found that none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript.

This means that they cannot access content that is generated on the client-side using JavaScript.

AI crawlers also tend to have different content type priorities than traditional search engines.

For example, ChatGPT prioritizes HTML content, while Claude focuses heavily on images.

This suggests that AI crawlers are collecting data for a variety of purposes, not just for search indexing.

The Impact of AI Crawlers on Your Website

The way AI crawlers interact with your website can impact your search visibility.

If your website relies heavily on JavaScript to render content, then AI crawlers may not be able to index your content correctly.

This could lead to your website being ranked lower in search results.

The study also found that AI crawlers have high rates of 404 errors, which means they are frequently trying to access pages that do not exist.

This can put a strain on your website’s resources and slow down load times.

Recommendations for Website Owners

Here are a few recommendations for website owners who want to ensure their website is accessible to AI crawlers:

• Prioritize server-side rendering (SSR) for critical content. This will ensure that your content is accessible to all crawlers, even those that do not render JavaScript.
• Manage your URLs efficiently. This includes maintaining proper redirects, keeping sitemaps up to date, and using consistent URL patterns across your site.
• Use robots.txt to control crawler access. You can use robots.txt to block AI crawlers from accessing sensitive or non-essential content.

AI Crawlers – A New Force in Web

AI crawlers are a new and evolving force in the web ecosystem.

By understanding how they work and how they differ from traditional search engines, you can take steps to ensure your website is accessible to them and that they are indexing your content correctly.

Three Extra Notes For Your Reference:

1. The study also found that AI crawlers are geographically distributed, with all of the measured crawlers operating from U.S. data centers.
2. The high rates of 404 errors suggest that AI crawlers may need to improve their URL selection and validation processes.
3. Traffic correlation analysis revealed interesting correlations between crawler behavior and site traffic. Pages with higher organic traffic receive more frequent crawler visits.

I hope this blog post has been informative.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below at https://aios.blog/!