Crawling is the automated process where bots explore the web to discover and index content. For AEO, being crawlable by AI data sources (Common Crawl, etc.) is essential to be included in training data.
What is Crawling?
Crawling is when automated bots (crawlers, spiders) browse websites to discover and index their content.
Key Crawlers
- Googlebot: Google's crawler
- Bingbot: Microsoft's crawler
- Common Crawl: Open web archive
- GPTBot: OpenAI's crawler
- ClaudeBot: Anthropic's crawler
Crawling and AEO
For your content to train LLMs or be used by RAG:
- Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt
- Ensure site accessibility
- Maintain clean technical SEO