Web crawlers explained: how they work and 10 common crawlers

Web crawlers are automated bots that discover, download, parse, and index web pages by starting from trusted seed URLs and following links while typically respecting robots.txt directives and request-rate limits. They support search indexing, AI model training and retrieval, price monitoring, and website auditing, with common examples including Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Applebot, DuckDuckBot, Amazonbot, CCBot, PerplexityBot, and Bytespider. Search crawlers generally create indexes that direct users back to source sites, while AI crawlers may collect material for training, index content for cited responses, or retrieve individual pages at a user’s request. Site owners can manage crawler access through robots.txt, noindex directives, rate controls, and services such as Cloudflare, although compliance depends on each crawler and user-agent strings should be independently verified. Exa describes its ExaSearchBot as a robots.txt-compliant crawler for its AI search infrastructure, stating that its index tracks trillions of URLs and is designed to provide fresh, detailed web information beyond the choices of third-party search engines.

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