From Googlebot To GPTBot: Who's Crawling Your Site In 2025
Cloudflare, July 1,2025
Web crawlers are not new. The World Wide Web Wanderer debuted in 1993, though the first web search engines to truly use crawlers and indexers were JumpStation and WebCrawler.
Crawlers are part of one of the backbones of the Internet's success: search. Their main purpose has been to index the content of websites across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results and direct users appropriately. In this blog post, we're analyzing recent trends in web crawling, which now has a crucial and complex new role with the rise of AI.