When AI Comes to Your Website | Trakkr Research

Crawler share, entry patterns, revisit behavior, and bot-specific session styles. Answer pages, reference facts, and live trackers drawn from this study.

Methodology: Derived from When AI Comes to Your Website and updated February 1, 2026.

What this hub contains

Crawler share, entry patterns, revisit behavior, and bot-specific session styles. Answer pages, reference facts, and live trackers drawn from this study.

Answer Pages

Narrow questions answered directly from the study.

• Which AI crawler shows up most often? - GPTBot shows up most often by a wide margin. It accounts for 57.2% of observed crawler visits in the study, far ahead of OAI-SearchBot at 15.1%.
• Do AI crawlers start on the homepage? - Usually no, especially for GPTBot. GPTBot hits the homepage only 2.75% of the time, while ClaudeBot is much more homepage-friendly at 19.18%.
• Are most AI crawler visits one and done? - Yes. 88.5% of observed crawler sessions were single-visit sessions, while only 0.3% reached 10 or more visits.
• Does GPTBot behave differently from ClaudeBot? - Yes, very differently. GPTBot dominates raw volume and rarely touches the homepage, while ClaudeBot is smaller but more homepage-oriented and behaviorally diverse.
• Do AI crawlers read sites deeply? - Usually not. The study is dominated by shallow sessions, with 88.5% ending after one visit and only 0.3% reaching 10 or more requests.
• Are weekend patterns real for AI crawlers? - Yes. GPTBot runs 1.29x hotter on weekends than weekdays, and OAI-SearchBot shows an even stronger 1.41x weekend lift.
• Why do entry pages matter so much for AI bots? - Because most crawler sessions are shallow and many bots never see your homepage. The entry page often decides whether the bot finds a citeable explanation or leaves with nothing useful.
• Should you optimize for GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot separately? - Yes. GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot differ in scale and reading pattern, so a page architecture that works for one does not automatically capture the other at the same efficiency.
• What does the crawler data say about site architecture? - It says AI crawlers are biased toward easy-to-hit pages and often do not traverse deeply enough to rescue weak structure. The architecture has to expose useful answers early.
• Can you treat AI crawler traffic like normal SEO bot traffic? - Not safely. AI crawlers show different homepage preferences, session depths, and weekend patterns than classic search-engine assumptions would suggest.
• What is the main operational takeaway from the crawler study? - Operational takeaways from the When AI Comes to Your Website crawler study.
• Why is ClaudeBot worth watching even though its share is smaller? - Because its behavior is meaningfully different from the larger OpenAI bots. ClaudeBot hits the homepage far more often and explores a more diverse mix of page types despite only 3.8% share.

Reference Facts

Short, quotable claims with metrics and methodology context.

• GPTBot controls more than half of observed AI crawler traffic - GPTBot is the largest crawler family in the observed dataset.
• OAI-SearchBot is the second-largest crawler in the study - Search-oriented OpenAI traffic is substantial in its own right.
• GPTBot rarely uses the homepage as an entry point - GPTBot overwhelmingly lands deeper in the site.
• ClaudeBot is far more homepage-friendly than GPTBot - A comparative analysis of AI crawler entry points based on the study When AI Comes to Your Website.
• Single-visit sessions dominate AI crawler behavior - AI crawlers are usually shallow readers.
• Deep repeat sessions are extremely rare - Deep session depth is the exception, not the rule.
• GPTBot and SearchBot both show weekend lift - Observed crawler timing is not evenly distributed through the week.
• The study tracks more than 300,000 unique URLs - The dataset is wide enough to capture real site-architecture differences.

Trackers

Live benchmark views built from the study’s most reusable dimensions.

• AI crawler traffic share by bot - Observed crawler traffic share across major AI bot families.
• Crawler depth and homepage entry benchmark - Research tracker page for the study When AI Comes to Your Website, detailing the crawler depth and homepage entry benchmark.