How to Optimize for AI Crawlers

Crawling has always been the key to online visibility, but the rise of AI search is changing the game. Here’s how you can make sure you're seen by the new generation of bots without giving away the farm.

For the last two decades, web professionals really only had to worry about one major search engine's crawler. But things have changed. Recently, a bunch of new crawlers from different AI platforms have shown up at the door.

These new bots are here for more than just indexing your site for search results. They might be gobbling up your content to train their models or pulling information from a specific page on the fly to answer a user's question.

This brings up a big question: Should you let all these bots crawl your website? What's the point if your audience isn't even using these new AI tools? Is the cost of server resources and the loss of control over your content worth it?

There isn't a single right answer for everyone, but there is a clear way to think about it.

Letting the Bots In: A Net Benefit

For most websites, allowing AI crawlers to access the majority of your content is a good move. The visibility you gain is usually worth it.

However, you should absolutely protect your most valuable, unique intellectual property. Anything that is truly special should be kept behind a paywall or a user login to keep its value intact.

This means that for everything else, you'll want to actively optimize for AI crawling. This involves enriching your content and breaking it down into digestible "chunks" so you can earn a spot in AI-generated answers. Yes, many websites will likely see their overall traffic numbers dip in the coming years. But if you've already started filtering for AI-related traffic in your analytics platform, you might have noticed something interesting: the traffic that does come through is often much higher quality. AI surfaces are great at pre-qualifying a user's intent.

Beyond just traffic, showing up in AI results is becoming a huge part of building your brand's reputation. Getting prominent citations and mentions in AI-generated summaries influences how people perceive your brand. For many businesses, optimizing for these AI surfaces is the new frontier of visibility.

AI Is the New Front Door

AI search results are increasingly the first place users encounter a brand, making it vital that you show up early in their journey. Think of these AI platforms as the new "category pages" of the internet. They:

• Aggregate different offers.
• Compare competitors side-by-side.
• Link out to what they consider the "best" options.

In some rare cases, AI might even convert a customer on a brand's behalf. But crucially, the AI still relies on the brand to actually fulfill the order or provide the service.

This isn't a totally new concept. It's similar to how large e-commerce marketplaces have operated for years. And just like with those platforms, winning with AI isn't about controlling every single interaction. It's about earning brand recognition by providing a fantastic product and fulfillment experience.

The goal is that the next time a user needs what you offer, they remember you and come to your site directly, skipping the AI search altogether. That's how you build market share.

What If You're an Aggregator?

What if your site's whole business is aggregating content from smaller players, like real estate portals, job boards, or service marketplaces? Should you be worried that AI will just bypass you and go straight to the source?

Probably not.

Let's be realistic. Even with today's easy-to-use content management systems, many small and medium-sized businesses struggle just to keep a basic website running. The idea that they will all figure out how to distribute their content effectively to dozens of AI platforms is a stretch.

I just don't see a future where thousands of small, independent websites across every industry are all perfectly aggregated by AI systems. This is where trustworthy aggregators continue to play a vital role. They filter, vet, and standardize information. AI systems need that structure and reliability.

Aggregators that offer more than just basic listings—like verified review data—will be even more protected from being cut out by AI. Still, AI systems will likely continue to give more visibility to established, big brands.

The Special Case for Media Sites

The real risk is for media outlets that rely on pageviews for revenue. Traffic to generic, commodity content is already dropping as users get their answers directly on AI surfaces.

For publishers and anyone creating article-based content, the solution isn't to block AI bots completely. It's to adapt. You need to:

• Adopt smarter editorial strategies.
• Find new ways to make money beyond ads.
• Focus on getting prominent citations in AI results.
• Own your share of the conversation, not just chase traffic numbers.

If you block AI crawlers entirely, you're just handing over that visibility to a competitor.

The only real exception is if you have content that can't be replicated. This includes things like:

• Highly specialized research.
• Unique advice from genuine experts.
• Valuable user-generated content, like a massive database of reviews.

In these cases, you don't have to go all-or-nothing. Consider allowing partial crawling. Give the bots a small taste to earn citations and stay relevant, but don't let them have the whole feast. This lets your brand compete while protecting your unique advantage.

How to Prepare Your Content for AI Crawlers

So, if we agree that the goal is to encourage AI crawling, how do you optimize your content for it? Being optimized for the main search engine's bot isn't enough anymore. You now have to appeal to a wide range of crawlers, and not all of them are equally sophisticated.

What's more, indexing is no longer just about the URL. Content is broken down into its most important components, or "chunks," which are then stored for retrieval.

Think of each section of your content as a standalone piece of information. To win those valuable AI citations, you should:

• Stick to one self-contained idea per paragraph.
• Keep paragraphs short, between 1-4 sentences.
• Use clear subheadings, marked up as <h2> or <h3>.
• Use the proper names of entities (people, places, things).
• Prioritize clarity over cleverness in your writing.
• Use structured, semantic HTML that's easy to parse.
• Think multi-modal; make sure your images and videos are also crawlable.
• Don't rely on JavaScript to display content, as not all crawlers can process it.
• Use factually accurate, up-to-date information.

If an AI crawler can't access and understand your content, it won't cite it. Simple as that.

A Note on Emerging 'Standards'

Despite some chatter, files like llms.txt are not an official standard. They are not widely adopted, and no major AI indexer respects them. This means that if you create one, it probably won't be checked by default, and you'll see little benefit.

Could that change in the future? Maybe. But for now, don't waste your time implementing a file that bots aren't even looking for. Your time is far better spent on other technical SEO improvements, like using graph-based structured data or improving your crawl speed. Those are much more likely to have a positive impact on your visibility in AI results.

Speeding Up Your Site for Bots

Many of the classic tactics for traditional search are just as important for AI bots. Pay attention to:

• Fast server response times. Aim for under 600 milliseconds at a maximum, but closer to 300 is ideal.
• A clean URL structure. This is more efficient than relying on hints like rel=canonical. If you can't clean up the structure, use robots.txt to block routes that offer no SEO value.
• Graceful handling of pagination.
• Real-time XML sitemaps submitted to the webmaster tools of major search and AI platforms.
• Using Indexing APIs to submit fresh content whenever possible.

These fundamentals are even more critical now. Search engines are actively cleaning up their indexes, rejecting tons of previously indexed URLs to improve the quality of content available for AI-generated answers.

That said, measuring your site's crawlability needs to go beyond the simple reports you find in a search engine's console. You need to get comfortable with analyzing server log files, which give you a clear picture of all the different AI crawlers visiting your site. Tools from CDN providers and AI visibility trackers are making this data more accessible than ever.

Why Even SEO Tool Crawlers Matter Now

While bots from search engines and AI platforms get most of the attention, crawlers from SEO tools also visit many websites frequently.

Before AI search became a big deal, the common advice was to block most of them. They used up server resources and didn't offer much in return.

My view on this has completely changed. Now, I let them crawl because they contribute to brand visibility within AI-generated content.

It’s one thing for me to claim my website is a leader in its field. It carries a lot more weight when a major AI platform says it, citing data from a respected SEO tool.

AI systems thrive on consensus. The more aligned signals they can find about your brand from different sources, the more likely they are to repeat your message. Allowing SEO crawlers to verify your market position, getting featured on comparison sites, and being listed in directories all help reinforce your narrative—assuming, of course, that you're delivering real value.

In the AI era, we're moving from link building to citation management. It’s about curating a body of crawlable content, both on-site and off-site, that confirms your brand's story through external sources.

This builds trust. This adds weight.

Crawling isn't just about website indexing anymore. It’s about digital brand management. So let the bots crawl. Feed them structured, useful, high-quality content. Visibility in the age of AI isn't just about traffic—it's about trust, positioning, and brand authority.