An AI crawler is the automated client an AI service sends out to read web pages for the material its answers get built from, and it announces a different name and obeys a different set of access rules than the crawlers written for ranked search.
This is the sense CiteAngle uses when it measures. The word travels with other meanings in this market, so we pin ours before it turns up in a report.
Where this lands in the measurement
Close the door and the material an answer could have quoted never gets collected, so access is checked before anything is counted.
We read robots.txt next to what the server actually returns, then list what is open and what is shut, page by page.
What it costs to leave this loose
Leave the door shut and the material an answer could have quoted never gets collected. The pages exist and never enter the pool.
Access is checked before anything is counted, reading robots.txt next to what the server actually returns, page by page.
Who you want measuring this
One reading does not settle a term like this. The answer an assistant writes today can name different companies tomorrow, so a Panorama round puts 50 buyer questions to every place on our US list, 7 separate times each, and reads all 17 of them — ChatGPT · Perplexity · Claude · Gemini · Grok · Google AI Overviews · Google AI Mode · Bing Copilot · DuckDuckGo AI Assist · Google Search · Bing Search · Yahoo Search · DuckDuckGo Search · Google News · Bing News · YouTube · Google Short Videos. Radar starts at 5 questions and covers the same list under the same rule.
We put the same questions to the competitors you name inside the same runs, so you see both in one table. The conditions are sealed, so you can reproduce the round and check it, and every planned observation is published with its state, failures included. When you choose who measures this, check that all three are in place.
That describes how the measuring is done. It is not a promise about where your numbers land.
Pages that use this term
Terms worth pinning at the same time