AI bots on your site: what they do, real or fake, and what it brings

Under Edge SEO › Search engines and AI you see, per AI crawler, how often it visits, which pages it reads and whether it goes up or down. You also see how many visitors ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude send you.

Three types of AI visits

• Search index (such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot): your page enters the index that AI assistants pick their sources from. This counts the most for being found in AI.
• Live question (such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User): someone is asking a question right now and the AI reads your page to answer. Every visit is a real question.
• Training (such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot): your text may end up in a future version of a model. That takes months and you can't see when.

Does a lot of AI traffic mean AI mentions you?

Not automatically, but it is the first step: AI can't mention what it doesn't read. For each question, the AI picks the source that gives the best answer. Nobody can guarantee that is you. Your chances improve if your text is in the HTML (most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript), titles and headings are clear, you have schema and an llms.txt, your pages load fast, your information is concrete and current, and other sites link to you. The Ready for AI? checklist shows what is still missing on your site.

Real or fake

Not every bot that calls itself GPTBot comes from OpenAI. Scrapers like to pose as a well-known bot. OpenAI and Perplexity publish the IP addresses of their bots. We compare every visit with those lists, which the edge refreshes every day. We check Google, Bing and Apple via DNS. In the list, each bot gets a real label or a count of fake visits. Fake visits are not included in your numbers, and with Block fake bots on (the default), the edge stops them. For bots whose maker doesn't publish a list, we do show them, but without the real label.

Block training?

You choose this yourself under Security. Blocking training does not remove you from ChatGPT Search or Perplexity, because they use other bots. If you want to be found in AI, always allow the search and live bots. Through the edge, most pages are served from the cache, so a lot of AI traffic costs your server little.