AI visibility is essential for SEOs, beginning with managing AI crawlers. If AI crawlers cannot access your pages, your site remains invisible to AI discovery engines. Conversely, uncontrolled AI crawlers may inundate servers with excessive requests, leading to crashes and unexpected hosting charges. User-agent strings are key to controlling AI crawler access, yet official documentation often lacks completeness or is outdated. To address this, we curated a verified list of AI crawlers from actual server logs, validating each user-agent against official IP lists when available to ensure accuracy. This list will be regularly maintained to capture new crawlers and updates to existing ones. **Complete Verified AI Crawler List (December 2025)** All user-agent strings have been verified against Search Engine Journal server logs. **Popular AI Agent Crawlers Without User-Agent Identification** Some AI crawlers do not identify themselves via user-agent strings, including you. com, ChatGPT’s Operator agent, Bing’s Copilot chat, Grok, and DeepSeek. Tracking these requires identifying their explicit IP addresses. For example, we set a trap page (e. g. , /specific-page-for-you-com/) and used on-page chat to prompt you. com to visit, allowing us to find corresponding IPs in server logs. **Agentic AI Browsers** Browsers like Comet or ChatGPT’s Atlas do not differentiate themselves in user-agent strings, blending indistinguishably with normal user visits. This hinders SEOs from tracking agentic browser visits, which is unfortunate for reporting purposes. **How to Check What’s Crawling Your Server** Some hosting providers offer interfaces to access server logs easily. If not, you can retrieve server log files (often found at /var/log/apache2/access. log on Linux servers) via FTP or request them from support.

Logs can be analyzed using tools such as Google Sheets (for CSV files), Screaming Frog’s log analyzer, or Gemini AI for files under 100 MB. **Verifying Legitimate vs. Fake Bots** Fake crawlers may spoof legitimate user agents (e. g. , ClaudeBot) to bypass restrictions and scrape content aggressively. Verification primarily involves checking request IPs against official IP lists. Requests from verified IPs can be allowed; others should be blocked. Firewalls with allowlisting can enforce this, permitting legitimate bot requests and blocking impostors. For instance, WordPress users can use the free Wordfence plugin to allowlist official IPs and add custom blocking rules. Note that IP spoofing is possible, and if both user-agent and IP are spoofed, blocking becomes difficult. **Conclusion: Maintain Control Over AI Crawlers to Ensure Reliable AI Visibility** AI crawlers are an integral part of the web ecosystem, representing major AI platforms indexing the web, with the list expected to grow. Regularly monitoring server logs helps you understand who accesses your site and avoid unintentionally blocking AI crawlers if visibility in AI search engines matters for your business. To block unwanted AI crawlers, use robots. txt with their user-agent names. This curated AI crawler list will be updated continuously as new crawlers appear or existing ones change. Bookmark or revisit this resource regularly to stay informed. **Additional Resources:** - Introduction To LLMs For SEO With Examples - Marketing To AI Agents Is The Future – Research Shows Why - Agentic AI In SEO: AI Agents & Workflows For Ideation (Part 1) *Featured Image credit: BestForBest/Shutterstock*