The AI web crawlers are here whether you like it or not, so your B2B business needs to be strategic and intentional about what website data you’re letting them in on.
Crawlers, bots, scrapers and spiders are all one and the same.
HubSpot summarises crawlers' functionality simply as “a bot that searches and indexes content on the internet. Essentially, web crawlers are responsible for understanding the content on a web page so they can retrieve it when an inquiry is made.” Traditionally, these crawlers are used by search engines like Google to ensure your website shows up accurately in search queries—or not. Website owners also have the option to disallow crawlers, which prevents the site or specific pages from being indexed and shown as search results.
AI companies are using this same technology to crawl website data for the purpose of training the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power their AI chatbots, like ChatGPT. These LLMs process gigantic volumes of digital data—including images, documents and databases—in order to accurately answer prompts and provide users with relevant information.
Generally speaking, if your B2B business relies on organic SEO then let the crawlers do their thing.
With ChatGPT alone surpassing 300 million active weekly users, there’s no denying that AI is the future of search engine technology. Whether it’s Google Gemini, offering “expanded AI Overviews, more planning and research capabilities, and AI-organised search results” to “take the legwork out of searching,” or Bing’s equivalent offering of Microsoft Copilot, there is a lot of visibility up for grabs. Plus, source content backlinking is continuing to improve as these AI models mature, which could also benefit your off-site SEO.
AI is also increasingly impacting the traditional buyer’s journey, both in B2B and B2C spaces, particularly when it comes to the consideration and decision phases. Users no longer have to spend hours searching through competitors, reading user reviews, and assessing the pros and cons of a particular product or solution—any AI chatbot will do this research in seconds. The use of AI to aggregate and evaluate customer reviews, both on-site and through other content sources such as Reddit, is now a normal part of the pathway to purchase.
While being highly visible across these AI spaces can be beneficial, there are some potential drawbacks to consider, particularly for niche B2B businesses.
We know all too well that AI isn’t perfect, and the context or subtleties of your content can be at risk of being lost in translation. For example, if your product caters to multiple audiences and your website offers tailored information for each respective group, an AI chatbot may not pick up on this user context, resulting in imperfect information being provided about your business or offerings.
The lack of control over where and when your brand appears in the ChatGPT response can be unnerving, to say the least. AI web crawlers pick and choose bits of content from multiple sources to provide a single query result; important information can be overlooked. Content from your website may also be presented alongside other information from varying sources that you might not care to have an association with.
Keep your company data safe and block AI crawlers from accessing proprietary information. This might include customer logins or certain internal resource pages. Hopefully, this has already been addressed as part of your web security configuration (if not, get onto your website provider ASAP). There are some bits of private data we don’t need the prying AI eyes to see!
Decide whether your website puts out the welcome mat for AI bots or tells these crawlers to take a hike, all from your robots.txt file. This file essentially stands guard at the door of your website, determining which crawlers can enter to index your content and which crawlers are not permitted. Update permissions for your entire site or specific pages, and allow or disallow individual AI crawlers of your choosing (and if you’re a HubSpot user, here’s where to find and edit your robots.txt file).
Research conducted by Cloudflare identifies Bytespider, Amazonbot, ClaudeBot, and GPTBot as the top AI crawlers, but there’s a long list of others in the mix as well. It can also be helpful to peek at your comparators' and competitors' robots.txt files to compare notes. These files are available publicly; simply add /robots.txt to the backend of any URL, and you’ll see their crawler access settings.
On the SEO front, you can also optimise your site for these crawlers by creating an llms.txt file. This file is “designed to coexist with current web standards. While sitemaps list all pages for search engines, llms.txt offers a curated overview for LLMs. It can complement robots.txt by providing context for allowed content. The file can also reference structured data markup used on the site, helping LLMs understand how to interpret this information in context.”
Extra info: In this technical blog post from Semrush, you can learn more about the functionality of robots.txt files and how they impact SEO.
Get in touch with the Aamplify team to lock down your B2B marketing strategy.
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