When we talk about technical SEO, most of us automatically think about Googlebot.
We check whether Google can crawl the website, whether the sitemap is working, whether important pages are indexable, and whether robots.txt is blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked.
That's all important.
But while working on technical SEO and AI search, we started asking another question:
Do AI crawlers actually explore websites in the same way as Googlebot?
To find out, we looked at server logs from a mid-sized website and compared visits from Googlebot with known AI crawler user-agents, including GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot.
What we found made us rethink part of our technical SEO checklist.
Googlebot and AI Crawlers Don't Always Explore the Same Pages
Googlebot generally needs to discover and understand a website's content so Google can potentially include relevant pages in search results.
AI crawlers can have different purposes. Some may collect content for training, while others may access pages for search or answer-generation systems.
When we looked at the logs, we noticed that Googlebot was spending time exploring deeper parts of the website, including paginated category pages.
The AI crawlers we identified behaved differently.
They appeared more focused on important informational pages, FAQs, and higher-level content rather than systematically exploring every part of the site.
This doesn't mean every AI crawler behaves this way. Different bots have different purposes and crawling patterns.
But it gave us an important lesson:
Don't assume that optimizing a website for Googlebot automatically means every AI crawler will discover your most important content.
Robots.txt Doesn't Tell the Whole Story
Robots.txt is still an important part of managing crawler access.
However, it's important to remember that different crawlers may interpret and follow instructions differently.
That's why we don't simply add a rule to robots.txt and assume the job is finished.
If controlling crawler access matters to your business, check your actual server logs and verify what's happening.
Your logs can tell you which user-agent requested a page, when it happened, and which URL was accessed.
What We Changed in Our Technical SEO Process
After looking at this data, we started adding another step to our technical SEO work.
Alongside the normal SEO crawl and indexability checks, we create a simple list of pages that are especially important for AI visibility.
These might include:
- Core service pages
- Detailed guides
- Original research
- Important product pages
- FAQ pages
- Authoritative resource pages
We then make sure these pages are easy to discover.
That means linking to them from relevant high-value pages, maintaining a clean sitemap, and avoiding unnecessary layers of navigation.
We're not trying to control exactly what an AI crawler will read. We simply want to make sure that the content we consider important isn't buried somewhere deep inside the website.
How Can You Check AI Crawlers on Your Website?
The easiest place to start is your server access logs.
Look for user-agent strings associated with known crawlers, such as GPTBot, PerplexityBot, or ClaudeBot. A log-analysis platform can make this easier when a website receives a large amount of traffic.
You can also use tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider to audit your website's internal links, status codes, directives, and crawlable URLs.
For Google's side, Google Search Console remains useful for understanding how Google sees and indexes your website.
The Bigger Technical SEO Lesson
We don't think you need a completely separate “AI SEO website.”
You still need the fundamentals: a crawlable site, clean internal linking, useful content, a healthy sitemap, and sensible technical configuration.
But AI search is another reason to ask a more practical question:
Can the systems that matter to my business actually discover my most important content?
That's the question we're adding to our technical SEO checklists now.
Because ranking well on Google is important.
But if your best content is difficult for other search and AI systems to discover, you're potentially leaving another source of visibility on the table.
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