# When AI Comes to Your Website | Trakkr Research

Canonical URL: https://trakkr.ai/trakkr-research/crawler-behavior/answers
Published: 2026-02-01
Last updated: 2026-02-01
Author: Mack Grenfell

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.

## Data And Sources

- [When AI Comes to Your Website](https://trakkr.ai/trakkr-research/crawler-behavior) - Flagship source study
- [Hub JSON](https://trakkr.ai/data/research-answers/crawler-behavior/hub.json) - Machine-readable hub payload