68 Million AI Crawler Visits: Understanding AI Search Visibility

A new study looked at over 858,000 sites on the Duda platform to see how AI crawlers are visiting websites. This research helps us understand how AI crawling is growing and what businesses can do to get more traffic through AI search.

AI Crawling Is Growing Fast

AI crawling is increasing quickly. More websites are being crawled to provide real-time answers to user questions. Most crawling comes from one main provider, creating clear patterns about which sites are most active and why.

Significant Growth in AI Referral Traffic

Over the past year, traffic from AI systems has increased significantly. Here are some key stats:

• Total AI referrals went from 93,484 to 161,469, a growth of 72.7%.
• Traffic from ChatGPT grew from 81,652 to 136,095 (+66.7%).
• Claude saw a massive rise from 106 to 2,488 visits.
• Copilot jumped from 22 to 9,560 visits.

Overall, AI is becoming a major source of traffic for many websites.

How Crawlers Work Now

AI crawlers are no longer just for indexing sites. They mostly fetch content in real-time to answer user questions. Here’s how the crawling activity breaks down:

• 56.9% is for real-time answers, mainly driven by ChatGPT.
• 28.8% is for training AI models.
• 14.3% is for indexing content.

ChatGPT is responsible for most of this activity, showing how AI supports a new way of finding information.

Concentration in AI Crawling

Most AI crawling activity comes from OpenAI. Here’s how it breaks down:

• OpenAI (ChatGPT): 55.8 million visits (81.0%)
• Claude (Anthropic): 11.5 million visits (16.6%)
• Perplexity: 1.3 million visits (1.8%)
• Google (Gemini): 380,000 visits (0.6%)

OpenAI’s dominance shows it’s the primary tool for users looking for information.

Widespread Crawling Activity

AI crawling is active across many websites. Here are some figures:

• Total sites analyzed: 858,457
• Sites with at least one AI visit: 506,910 (59%)
• Total AI crawler visits (February 2026): 68.9 million

AI crawling is not only for popular websites; it’s happening across a broad range of sites.

The Link Between Crawling and Human Traffic

Websites that allow AI crawling see more human traffic. Here are some statistics:

• Average human visits for crawled sites: 527.7 vs. 164.9 for non-crawled sites (3.2 times higher).
• Average form completions: 4.17 vs. 1.57 (2.7 times higher).
• Average click-to-call requests: 8.62 vs. 3.46 (2.5 times higher).

This data indicates that sites attracting human visitors are revisited frequently by AI systems.

What Boosts AI Crawling?

The study examined sites with various features and how they relate to AI crawling activity. The findings highlight three main factors:

1. External Integrations

Websites connected to external review systems are crawled more often. For example:

• With Yext integration: 97.1% crawl rate.
• With reviews integration: 89.8% crawl rate.

2. Structured Site Features

Websites that have structured business data are favored by AI crawlers:

• Google Business Profile sync: 92.8% crawl rate.
• Local schema: 72.3% crawl rate.

3. Content Depth

More content results in more visits from crawlers. For instance:

• Websites with over 50 blog posts: 1,373.7 average crawler visits.

Local Business Schema

Completeness of local schema is crucial:

• No local schema fields: 55.2% crawl rate.
• 10-11 completed schema fields: 82% crawl rate (a significant increase).

This shows that detailed local business information leads to more visits from AI crawlers.

Key Takeaways

AI crawling is changing how we discover content online. Here are some important points:

• AI crawling works alongside traditional search.
• Websites with structured data, deeper content, and comprehensive local schema are crawled more often.
• Patterns among crawled sites indicate what works, even though they don’t prove direct causation.

In summary, making it easy for AI crawlers to access your site can lead to better visibility and increased traffic. By focusing on structured, verifiable information and building real audience demand, websites can take advantage of AI search.

For more details, check the full research study from Duda here.