What AI crawler means
An AI crawler is a piece of software run by an AI company that visits public web pages and reads their content. Assistants use what these crawlers collect to answer questions later.
Say your product page sits behind a script-heavy homepage or a robots rule that blocks a crawler by name. That crawler never reads your description, so any assistant relying on it has nothing accurate to work from when a buyer asks about you.
An AI crawler is not the same thing as a search engine crawler, and letting one in does not guarantee an assistant will use or trust what it reads.
Check which crawlers can reach your site by testing your robots rules against the exact user agent names AI companies publish, not just against a general bot check.
Why this matters for builders
Blocked crawlers can leave your product invisible in AI answers.
Mistake builders make often
A common slip is blocking crawlers globally in robots.txt to stop scrapers, without realizing that rule also blocks the AI crawlers you want reading your product page.
What to do now
Run your domain through the Can AI Bots Read My Site? tool to see which named AI crawlers are allowed or blocked today.