AI Bots
The bots Visibility Kit identifies, and what each one means for your site.
Not every "AI bot" hit means the same thing. Visibility Kit classifies every detected bot into one of three categories based on what the bot is actually doing at the moment of the request.
The three bot types
user_action. "A human just asked AI about your page"
These bots fetch a specific page right now because a human asked an AI a question and the AI needs your page to compose an answer. High-signal: this is the retrieval layer of the AI funnel.
| Bot | Platform |
|---|---|
ChatGPT-User | OpenAI / ChatGPT |
Claude-User | Anthropic / Claude |
Perplexity-User | Perplexity |
MistralAI-User | Mistral |
Meta-ExternalFetcher | Meta AI |
TikTokSpider | TikTok |
search. "AI is indexing your page"
AI search engines crawl your site to populate their own search results. Lower time-sensitivity than user_action bots, but a necessary precondition for citations and referrals downstream.
| Bot | Platform |
|---|---|
OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI / ChatGPT Search |
Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic / Claude |
PerplexityBot | Perplexity |
GoogleOther | |
Applebot | Apple |
Amazonbot | Amazon |
PetalBot | Huawei |
YouBot | You.com |
training. "AI is scraping your content for model training"
Bulk crawlers collecting content to train future models. Most site owners have opinions about these. Visibility Kit shows them so you can decide what to do.
| Bot | Platform |
|---|---|
GPTBot | OpenAI |
ClaudeBot | Anthropic |
Claude-Web | Anthropic (legacy) |
Google-Extended | |
Meta-ExternalAgent | Meta |
Bytespider | ByteDance |
CCBot | Common Crawl |
Easy confusions worth heading off
ClaudeBot is not Claude-User. ClaudeBot is bulk scraping your site to train future models. Claude-User is a targeted fetch because a specific human just asked Claude about something on your page. Same company, completely different activities.
GPTBot is not ChatGPT-User. Same pattern: GPTBot is training, ChatGPT-User is retrieval.
Gemini has no published bot user-agent. Google doesn't publish a Gemini-specific crawler. Gemini referrals are tracked via the referrer header (see AI referrers), but Gemini-specific bot hits aren't. Google treats Gemini indexing through its general GoogleOther and Google-Extended bots, which Visibility Kit does identify.
What you can do with this
- Block training bots via
robots.txtif you don't want your content in training datasets, and use Visibility Kit to confirm the block is working. - Prioritize content visibility for search bots and user_action bots. These are the bots that can send you traffic.
- Watch for retrieval activity as a leading indicator that your content is being cited in AI answers.
Bigger list
We track the bots that actually matter for visibility and referral tracking. For a more exhaustive list of AI crawl bots and what each one does, see our writeup at Complete SEO: Complete list of AI crawl bots and what they do.