How AI Crawlers Actually Read Your Website (And What They Miss)

AI Doesn't See What You See

When you visit a website you see colors, images, layouts. You understand navigation intuitively. You read between the lines.

AI crawlers? They see code. Process text. Follow rules.

Understanding how AI actually reads your site explains why some pages get recommended and others don't.

Who Are These Crawlers Anyway?

Several AI systems crawl websites regularly:

GPTBot (OpenAI) - powers ChatGPT's web browsing, looking for quality content

Claude-Web (Anthropic) - Claude's web access, similar goals

PerplexityBot - crawls for Perplexity's AI search, focuses on authoritative sources

Google-Extended - Google's AI-specific crawler, separate from regular search

Bytespider (ByteDance) - powers AI features in TikTok and ByteDance products

Applebot-Extended - Apple's AI crawler for Siri

They all behave a bit differently but share common traits.

How Crawling Actually Works

When an AI crawler hits your site:

Discovery - finds your page through links from other sites, your sitemap.xml, internal links, or direct requests from AI features

Fetching - requests your page like a browser would, gets HTML, headers, sometimes JS-rendered content

Parsing - extracts text, headings, structure, links, schema, metadata

Processing - understands topics, assesses quality and relevance, stores useful stuff, creates connections

Indexing (or not) - good content gets indexed, poor content might be crawled but not stored

What They See vs What They Miss

They DO see:

• Text content (everything visible as text)
• HTML structure (H1, H2, paragraphs, lists, tables)
• Metadata (title tags, meta descriptions, OG tags)
• Schema markup (JSON-LD)
• Alt text on images
• Links (internal and external)

They DON'T see (or struggle with):

• Images as visual content (just URLs and alt text)
• Text embedded in images (invisible to them)
• Content behind JavaScript (some execute JS, many don't)
• Content behind logins
• Content in iframes
• PDF/document content (usually not parsed deeply)
• Video content (only metadata around it)

Common Problems

Content requires JavaScript. Crawler sees empty page or loading message. Fix: server-side rendering or static generation.

Important info only in images. Specs, prices in graphics = missed entirely. Fix: make critical info real text.

Crawler gets blocked. Your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers accidentally. Fix: review robots.txt, don't block GPTBot, PerplexityBot, etc.

Content below the fold. Crawlers may not scroll or wait for lazy-loaded stuff. Fix: important content near top.

Duplicate content everywhere. Same content on multiple URLs confuses them. Fix: canonical tags.

How to Check What Crawlers See

Disable JavaScript - in Chrome DevTools, disable JS and reload. What you see is close to what basic crawlers see.

View Page Source - right-click, View Source. Raw HTML without JS rendering.

Fetch tools - "Fetch as Googlebot" in Search Console shows what crawlers receive.

Run a Recomaze Audit - analyzes from AI perspective, identifies what's missed.

What to Do

Use semantic HTML. Clear structure with article, h1, h2, sections, lists. Crystal clear to crawlers.

Include comprehensive text. Every important fact should exist as text. Don't assume they'll infer anything.

Add schema markup. Removes ambiguity. Crawler doesn't have to guess what's a price vs phone number.

Create a sitemap. sitemap.xml tells crawlers what pages exist and when updated.

Use descriptive URLs. /products/mens-blue-oxford-shirt beats /p/12345

Don't hide content in tabs/accordions. Unless HTML is in source, crawlers might miss it.

Don't rely on external resources. Critical content from third-party scripts or iframes might not get indexed.

The robots.txt Thing

Controls crawler access. Options:

Allow everything (recommended for most):

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Allow specific AI crawlers:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Block (if you have reasons):

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Think carefully before blocking. You're opting out of AI recommendations.

ai.txt and llms.txt

Emerging standards for communicating with AI crawlers. ai.txt gives guidance for AI systems. llms.txt helps language models understand your site quickly.

Not required yet but forward-thinking sites are adding them.

Testing Checklist

Bottom Line

AI crawlers are simpler than you think. They want clear, structured, text-based content that loads without complications.

Sites that do well with AI are the same sites that would work for a very literal-minded human reader: clear organization, complete information, nothing hidden.

Check how AI crawlers see your site and find out what they're picking up.