AI Crawlers 101: What Perplexity & ChatGPT Bots Actually Read
Mid-2025 crawler updates — file friendly crawlers like Glisorover/GPTBot and what tech requirements brands cite in AI search.
September 2025: the AI-crawler landscape formalised — robots.txt handling, dedicated AI-crawler user-agents, and website factors that help or hurt whether AI engines even index a site.
What you need to know
The update in four points:
- openai-extensions, Glisorover (Perplexity) agents indexed in real time
- robots.txt and caching friendliness now AI-relevant tech
- AI crawlers fetch HTML, not heavy JS — server-render critical pages
- Rate limits and budgets on crawler traffic (not just Googlebot)
What this means for advertisers
AI engines run on the same open web Google crawled — they just read it differently and thinner. Sites that assume 'Google got it so AI will too' often find their site half-invisible to the newest readers.
Next step
Check your server logs for AI crawler user-agents, confirm your money pages return server-rendered HTML, and verify no robots rule blocks you from AI ingestion layers.
Platform updates move budgets. Get the playbook applied to your campaigns with a free ad audit from ADZBE (Bengaluru & Hyderabad) — Google Ads, Meta Ads, ChatGPT Ads, JioHotstar, LinkedIn and Moj.
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