The Complete AI Crawler List Every Independent Site Needs

Hi everyone, this is Neo.

Lately there’s been one topic getting hammered in our independent site operations circle. A lot of friends doing cross-border B2B and B2C have been venting to me: “Neo, my server keeps slowing down for no reason lately. I checked the logs and it’s full of weird User-Agents. Have I been attacked?”

Actually, this isn’t necessarily a malicious DDoS attack — it’s the era of the “AI traffic explosion” we’re all living through.

By December 2025, AI search engines and large language models have wormed their way into every corner of our traffic sources. For independent site operators, we’re facing a real dilemma:

  • Let everything through? Your server might get crushed by these AI crawlers, bandwidth bills spike, and your original content could get scraped for free to train LLMs.
  • Block everything? You might become completely “invisible” in emerging AI search channels like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude — and miss out on huge potential traffic.

Today, using the latest server log data, Neo has put together “The Complete List of AI Crawlers (December 2025)”. This isn’t just a list of names — it’s a hands-on playbook for taking control of your traffic through robots.txt.

Why Should You Care Which AI Crawler Is Which?

Before we dive into the list, we need to get one core idea straight: not all AI crawlers are created equal.

In simple terms, they fall into two buckets:

  1. Training Bots: They crawl your pages to “learn” — to train models like GPT-5 or Claude 4. They’re usually greedy, and their direct value to your SEO is limited (unless you count being trained into a model as long-term brand exposure).
  2. User/Search Bots: This is the real money traffic. When a user asks ChatGPT “recommend a Chinese injection mold supplier,” ChatGPT does a live web search — and that’s exactly when these bots show up. Block them and your site won’t appear in AI-generated answers.

Neo’s take:

For most of you in foreign trade and cross-border e-commerce, my advice is: open the door wide for search bots, and manage training bots on a case-by-case basis. Especially for B2B companies — the real-time search entry points on Perplexity and ChatGPT are extremely valuable. Don’t accidentally kill those.

The Big Players

1. OpenAI (ChatGPT)

OpenAI has the biggest impact on us, and to their credit, they’ve split their crawlers up quite carefully.

  • GPTBot
    • Purpose: Collecting AI training data.
    • Neo’s advice: If your server resources are tight, or you don’t like your content being used for training for free, you can Disallow it.
  • ChatGPT-User
    • Purpose: Real-time browsing. Triggered when a user is interacting with ChatGPT and needs live web access.
    • Neo’s advice: Must Allow! This is a direct traffic source.
  • OAI-SearchBot
    • Purpose: AI search indexing, used for ChatGPT’s search features.
    • Neo’s advice: Recommended to allow. It’s a new search traffic entry point.

2. Anthropic (Claude)

Claude had a very strong 2025, with a huge jump in users.

  • ClaudeBot
    • Purpose: Training data collection.
  • Claude-User
    • Purpose: Real-time web access by Claude users.
    • Neo’s advice: Must allow.
  • Claude-SearchBot
    • Purpose: Search indexing.

3. Perplexity (the new AI search kid on the block)

Perplexity is widely seen as the “Google challenger,” and it’s heavily used by people doing B2B product research and due diligence.

  • PerplexityBot (indexing) & Perplexity-User (real-time)
    • Neo’s take: Perplexity’s trademark move is citing source links directly in its answers. For SEO, that’s high-quality referral traffic. Never block Perplexity-related crawlers.

4. Google

Google is a special case, since it’s a search engine itself.

  • Google-Extended
    • Purpose: This is a control token. It doesn’t crawl directly — it tells Google: “You can index me for search rankings, but don’t use my content to train Gemini.”
    • Neo’s advice: If you want to protect your copyright without losing SEO rankings, you can Disallow Google-Extended in robots.txt.
  • Gemini-Deep-Research
    • Purpose: Proxy for Gemini’s deep research feature.

Social Media & E-commerce Giants

These crawlers tend to be “aggressive,” with high crawl rates that can put real strain on your server.

1. ByteDance (TikTok)

  • Bytespider
    • Purpose: Training ByteDance’s LLMs (Doubao, TikTok, etc.).
    • Current status: In many webmasters’ logs, Bytespider crawls at a very high frequency — it’s been nicknamed the “resource black hole.”
    • Neo’s advice: If your site relies mainly on Google SEO and your server keeps sounding alarms, consider rate-limiting or blocking Bytespider.

2. Meta (Facebook/Instagram)

  • Meta-ExternalAgent
    • Purpose: Training models like Llama.
    • Crawl volume: Extremely high (per SEJ data, up to 1,100 pages/hour).
  • Meta-WebIndexer
    • Purpose: Improving Meta AI search.

3. Amazon

  • Amazonbot
    • Purpose: Training Alexa and Amazon’s AI services.
    • Neo’s advice: If you don’t rely on Amazon on-site association and your server is strained, blocking it is worth considering.

How to Configure Robots.txt (Hands-On)

Enough theory — how do you actually do it? Open the robots.txt file in your site’s root directory.

Scenario 1: I want the traffic, but I don’t want my content used for training (recommended for most independent sites)

This strategy keeps your AI search traffic while preventing your content from being trained on for free.

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

Scenario 2: My server is about to die — block all the high-frequency crawlers

If your VPS is low-spec and keeps crashing, prioritize survival.

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: bingbot
Crawl-delay: 10  # limit Bing's crawl rate instead of blocking it entirely

Note: Don’t block ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, or Perplexity-User, or you’ll lose direct AI referral traffic.

Summary

In the AI era, the definition of SEO is being rewritten. We’re no longer optimizing just for Googlebot — we’re optimizing for a whole army of intelligent agents.

This list changes over time, so I’d suggest bookmarking this article. Check your server access logs once a month and see if any new User-Agents have shown up.

Neo’s final advice:

Embrace change, but keep the upper hand. Traffic is our lifeline; server resources are our cost. Use robots.txt well and be a smart independent site operator in this messy AI free-for-all.

If you still have questions about specific configurations, or you spot an unfamiliar crawler in your logs, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll figure it out together.

Reference: Complete Crawler List For AI User-Agents [Dec 2025]