The Ultimate Guide to LLM Crawlers in 2025: How AI Search Engines Read Your Website (and how you can get more traffic through it)

Welcome to the next frontier of search, where the rules are changing fast and the players aren’t just Google and Bing anymore. In 2025, your website isn’t just being crawled by search engines. It’s being read, summarized, and possibly even memorized by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI overviews and Grok. If your content isn’t ready for them, you’re leaving serious traffic on the table.

The Rise of AI Search Engines

AI Search engines are transforming how people search and get answers. Instead of clicking through 10 blue links, users ask a question, and get a direct answer, often with citations generated by AI. Behind the scenes, these answers are powered by LLM crawlers, bots built by OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI. Google and more, designed to read and understand your site.

Some of these crawlers are used to train the next generation of large language models (LLMs). Others power real-time search and citation. Both are rewriting the rules of online visibility and traffic to your website.

Here’s what’s happening right now:

• 🚀 63% of websites are visited daily by AI crawlers (source)
• 📈  AI-driven search traffic is growing 165 times faster than traditional organic search. (source) 
• 💡 AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) optimized sites can get 40% increase in visibility (source)

Getting your content read by AI crawlers means your content can reach millions. Not through links, but through answers.

Major LLM Crawlers in 2025 (At a Glance)

Want More Traffic? Do These 5 Things Now

1. Explicitly Allow Indexing Bots in Robots.txt

Below you can find an example where bots are allowed to crawl your website:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

2. Disallow Training Bots (If That’s Your Policy)

Below you can find an example where bots are not allowed to crawl your website:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow:

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

3. Make Sure Your Content is Crawlable FAST (Without JS)

Most AI crawlers do not render JavaScript (only Google's does). That means if your content is loaded via React or Vue client-side, they may never see it. Slow loading websites not only kills your conversion but it also makes bot struggle with reading your content.

4. Use Clear Headings, Metadata, and Clean HTML

Bots love clean structure. Use semantic tags (<article>, <section>, <h1>, etc.) and good meta descriptions. This helps AI systems understand and summarize your content accurately.

5. Be the emperor of context

AI answer engines are looking for answers, not keywords. ChatGPT dedicates 58% of requests to HTML content. Some content forms that work best:

• Statistical roundups with clear sources
• Definition-style content ("What is X?")
• Numbered guides (Easy to cite and parse)
• Comparison content (X vs Y)
• How-to guides with clear steps

Track and Optimize for AI Traffic

Tools like Prompttracker let you monitor how your and your competitors' content appears in ChatGPT, Claude, and others. Prompttracker also suggests improvements to get recommended by AI answer engines.

Final Word: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the New SEO

In 2025, traditional SEO isn’t dead, but it’s evolving fast. If you’re only optimizing for Google’s search index and ignoring how AI search Engines read and use your content, you’re missing the next wave of organic traffic.

You don’t need to be an AI engineer. But you do need to understand how these bots see your site, and how to guide them.

Want help optimizing for AI answer engines? Reach out to us or explore our monitoring tools at Prompttracker.io.

Let the bots in. Let the traffic flow.