Conductor AI: Are AI Bots Crawling Your Site?

In the new era of AI-powered search, your content's journey to visibility begins with a single, crucial step: being crawled. As users increasingly turn to AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity for answers, you need to know if their bots can find and access your pages. If they can't crawl your site, your content has no chance of being included in their responses or used for model training. 

Conductor is excited to introduce AI Crawler Activity tracking within Conductor Monitoring. This powerful enhancement to our Log File Analysis feature gives you the foundational data you need to ensure your content is discoverable in the age of AI. 

Watch the below clip from our "Unveiling Conductor AI: The Next Generation of Search Success" webinar to see the new data in action: 

Note: This feature is available as part of Conductor Monitoring Enterprise packages. If you are interested, contact your Conductor account team or Support to learn more. 

Understanding if and how AI bots interact with your website is the first step in any AI optimization strategy. This data is critical for several reasons: 

• It Confirms Accessibility: Think of a successful crawl as your "ticket to the game." Seeing crawl activity from bots like PerplexityBot and ChatGPT-User is the only way to confirm that your content is accessible and has the potential to be included in AI-generated results.

• It Helps Diagnose Technical Issues: If your content isn't appearing in AI search, low or nonexistent crawl data is your first clue. This points to a potential technical barrier—like an issue with site accessibility—that you can fix proactively.

• It Provides a Unified View: You can now see how new AI bots are interacting with your site right alongside traditional bots like Googlebot, all in one place. This allows you to compare crawl patterns and get a holistic view of how search engines see your content.

This new feature enhances the existing Log File Analysis capabilities within Conductor Monitoring to specifically track the activity of AI bots. 

For the first time, you can now see crawl data from ChatGPT and Perplexity directly in the CWM Pages report. The feature displays two key metrics for these new bots: 

• Visit Frequency: How often AI bots are crawling a specific page.

• Last Visited: The date a specific page was last crawled by an AI bot.

This functionality is available for Conductor Monitoring customers on the Enterprise package. 

Before you can see the data, you must ensure your system is configured to send it to Conductor. 

⚠️ Critical Prerequisite: Update Your Log File Configuration ⚠️ 

Your log file source must be configured to allow traffic from AI bot user agents. If your current setup filters these bots out, Conductor will not receive the data. 

• For Fastly and Akamai, you will need to update the exceptions in your traffic filter. Follow the “Filter away non-search engine traffic” section of the appropriate setup guide to implement the new conditions:

  • Fastly Setup Guide

  • Akamai Setup Guide

• For Cloudflare and Cloudfront, ensure you have not set up custom filters that would block the following user agents:

  • OAI-SearchBot

  • ChatGPT-User

  • GPTBot

  • PerplexityBot

  • Perplexity-User

Once configured, you can find AI crawler data with these steps: 

1. Navigate to Pages in Conductor Monitoring.

2. Click “Manage Columns” and look for the Search Engine Activity section. You can now enable columns for Perplexity and ChatGPT alongside Googlebot and Bingbot.

3. Use filters to analyze the data. For example, to see all pages visited by ChatGPT, you can apply a filter for "ChatGPT Visit Frequency is more than 0".

4. Click on any individual page to see its Page Details, where AI bot visit data is also recorded.

This data provides foundational insights that can guide your “AEO” efforts. Here are a few ways to put it into action: 

• Verify Foundational Access: The most immediate use case is to confirm that AI bots are successfully crawling your most important pages. If you see "No data" for key content, you know you have a technical issue to investigate first.

• Monitor Content Freshness: After you publish a new piece of content or optimize an existing one, monitor the "Last Visited" date. This tells you if and when AI bots have seen your latest updates, which is a prerequisite for that new content to influence AI responses.

• Troubleshoot AI Visibility Gaps: If you are using the AI Search Performance report and notice you aren't getting mentions or citations for a topic, AI Crawler Activity should be your first stop. A lack of crawl data for the relevant pages indicates a technical barrier, not necessarily a content quality problem, helping you prioritize the right fix.

By monitoring AI Crawler Activity, you gain the confidence that your content is discoverable by the next generation of search, setting the stage for a successful strategy in the AI era.