Your website visitors include both humans learning about your brand and AI crawler bots that scan your content and make decisions about your site's value.

Crawler bots were always a consideration for site owners, but in the age of LLMs, it’s even more important for marketers to understand which bots are crawling their sites.

If you want brand visibility in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, you need to know which bots are crawling your site, how they’re using your content, and what you can do to influence the outcome. This way, you can make informed decisions that help you become a definitive source that LLMs cite, quote, and recommend.

The AI crawler bots that visit your site

Here’s a quick primer on the different types of AI crawler bots that may visit your website.

• User bots

• Training bots

• Search bots

User bots

User bots are AI-powered agents that act on behalf of human users as real-time agents. When a user asks tools like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the bot can navigate websites, fetch information, and sometimes cite sources in the AI’s response. In this way, user bots serve as a bridge between the AI model and the live web, allowing the model to provide up-to-date answers that go beyond its training data.

Track how often AI bots crawl your site in Wix's SEO Reports

Training bots

Training bots suggest that your website has useful information that companies want to use to teach their AI systems. This could be good because it means your content is valuable, but it also means that your content may be used without citation, so the brand exposure is indirect. 

Some website owners, especially content sites, are concerned about their content being used to train AI without their permission. If that’s the case, you can block AI bots using robots.txt or use meta tags like noai/ noimageai tags.

View and compare bot traffic over time in Wix's SEO Reports

Search bots

AI search bots are automated crawlers designed to power AI-driven search engines, much like how Googlebot powers Google Search.

Instead of just indexing pages for keyword matches, these bots are focused on finding well-structured, reliable, and answer-ready content that LLMs can cite directly in responses. They move through your site by following links, scanning text, and interpreting structured data like FAQs or product markup.

For site owners, these bots are the most important to pay attention to, because they directly influence whether your brand appears in AI search results and conversational answers. If an AI search bot can easily crawl and understand your content, you’re far more likely to be cited and discovered. If there are certain areas you want to block, you can do so in robots.txt. (You can also read more about how LLMs.txt can improve conversational outcomes about your brand.)

How to know which bots are crawling your site

Wix and Wix Studio users have a streamlined way to obtain this information. Just go to your SEO Reports, and you’ll find two new dashboards.

1. AI Bot Traffic over Time: See how often AI bots crawl your site in response to user queries and for training.

   
   

2. AI Bot Visits by Page: See which site pages are crawled by AI bots in response to user queries and for training.

Two new dashboards in your SEO Reports

How to use bot logs to inform your marketing strategy

If you’re trying to improve your visibility in LLMs, you’ll mostly want to focus on search bots. Once you understand whether or not LLM search bots are crawling your site, you’ll likely encounter one of three scenarios:

• You’re not crawled (and you want to be)

• You’re crawled but not cited

• You’re crawled, visible, and cited

Let’s look at each one.

Scenario 1: You’re not crawled (and you want to be)

If you’re not crawled and you don’t want to be crawled, then you’ve achieved your goal. Make sure you block AI bots in robots.txt so they don’t crawl your site in the future. 

But if LLMs aren’t crawling your site and you want them to, first check your status in traditional search engines like Google. Are your pages indexed there?

If not…

• Review and fix robots.txt and noindex settings

• Ensure important pages load fast and without errors

• Build internal links and backlinks to increase discoverability

• Improve your performance with the Wix SEO Setup Checklist in the Wix SEO Dashboard

Keep in mind that this might not be an all-or-nothing scenario. Perhaps ChatGPT is crawling your site, but Perplexity isn't. In cases like this, research the specific integrations and requirements that each LLM platform offers.

Wix's SEO Setup Checklist

Scenario 2: You’re crawled but not cited

This is similar to Google crawling your website, but you’re not ranking. If your site is indexed but AI search tools don’t cite it, the issue can be with your site quality or authority. Crawling gets you in the door, but being cited requires demonstrating that your content is among the best available.

To improve your chances of citation, create content that meets the following criteria:

• It follows E-E-A-T principles (expertise, experience, authority, trust). AI search wants credible, trustworthy sources.

• It’s short and concise

• It’s structured to answer specific questions

• It’s enhanced with structured data markup (FAQ, How-To, Product, etc.)

• It includes original insights and research

  
  

Use content clustering when planning out your content as a whole, which means focusing on a subject and building authority in that domain.

Then, when creating your content, remember that AI systems are looking for answers, and they prefer shorter, more targeted content. This is a shift from traditional SEO content that favored long, comprehensive articles. AI content optimization is more concise and to the point.

Since there are millions of ways users can phrase the same query, you don't need to anticipate every possible question. Instead, focus on structuring your content so it provides clear answers to the problems your audience faces.

Off-site content plays a role, too. You want other sites and forums mentioning your brand in a positive way. Prioritize getting cited by authoritative sources, like industry publications, established news sites, academic institutions, and recognized experts. AI systems give more weight to content that's already been validated by trusted sources.

Scenario 3: You’re crawled, visible, and cited

Getting cited is a milestone, but you can turn it into a growth engine by studying what works and replicating it.

• Analyze the pages that are being cited: How is the content structured? What elements do they contain?

• Build internal links and backlinks 

• Apply your most successful structures to your new content

Over time, this strategy increases not just the frequency of citations, but also the breadth of your brand’s visibility across different AI platforms.

Like SEO, AI search isn’t a one-time achievement; it’s an ongoing process of staying relevant and authoritative. Keep monitoring AI search results to see how your site is represented, and continue refining your content so it stays accurate and distinctive. AI search is changing rapidly so you should always optimize and stay up-to-date with the latest AI visibility tools.