What are AI crawlers and why are they on my store?
Automated readers from AI companies collecting training data and grounding shopping answers - GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others. They read your catalog either to build models or to power AI product recommendations.
AI crawlers are bots operated by AI companies and answer engines. Training crawlers gather web content to build models; answer-engine crawlers fetch pages in real time to ground responses when users ask product questions; agentic crawlers act on a specific user's behalf, up to and including checkout.
For merchants, the answer-engine category is becoming a discovery channel: being readable there increasingly determines whether AI assistants can recommend your products. Visibility into which of these bots visit your store - and what they take - is the prerequisite for any policy.