List of AI crawlers essential to Generative Engine Optimization

Optimizing your presence in chatbot like ChatGPT has become essential as your customers increasingly rely on chatbot to identify suppliers. That is why you will have to invest in (Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the art of modeling ChatGPT answer about you company.

To do so, you must open access to your web site to AI crawlers.

So called experts write on Linkedin that all you have to do is submit your website to Bing service Indexnow.

But things are more complex. Dozens of AI crawler collect data to train LLMs on which chatbot base their responses.

GEO expert, Raphaël Richard from french Paris based AI agency, Neodia and AI training plateform 24pm Academy, identified 9 crawler families essential for getting your business listed in chatbots like ChatGPT.

Yes, if you thought Bing and Indexnow were the alpha and omega of GEO, GSO and AEO, you're wrong!

Bing doesn't feed the heart of ChatGPT's models, only their RAG.

When you send a prompt to ChatGPT, it is, first and foremost, the heart of its LLM that responds, the model itself (GPT4, GPT4.1, GPT 4.5, o3, o4-mini-high...).

This model is trained using data collected by specific crawlers.

1. LLM core” proprietary crawlers

These are the crawlers that OpenAI directly controls, and which supply the data used to train each model.

The name of the main OpenAI crawler that retrieves this type of data: GPTBot

2. Shared partner crawlers

Commoncrawl is a non-profit organization that collects and makes available billions of web pages for research, analysis or LLM training.

Commoncrawl plays an essential role in LLM training.

3. Systems for collecting specific structured or unstructured data

LLMs are trained on data such as books (with/without copyright, with/without authorization), media archives or bodies of laws/regulations.

They are not crawlers in the literal sense, but cousin systems.

4. Multimodal crawlers

LAION crawls the web to create text and image databases used to train multimodal LLMs.

5. UGC content crawlers

OpenAI crawlers are dedicated to forum and social network content (StackExchange, Reddit, etc.).

6. Versatile crawlers / Swiss army knives

Applebot-extended, Amazonbot, Facebookbot, Duckassistbot... collect information for multiple uses (displaying page summaries in Facebook, enriching SIRI or Duckducgo's “AI answers”, training Apple or Alexa's LLMs...).

When the LLM core is not enough, ChatGPT can supplement its answers with data from RAG crawlers.

7. RAG crawlers / “web search” partners

ChatGPT may also decide that it needs to supplement its answers with data from... Bing!

8. Proprietary RAG / “web search” crawlers

Like Bing, these crawlers feed a kind of complementary index.

Name of OpenAI crawler: OAI-SearchBot

In addition to these, there are also ...

9. Proprietary real-time crawlers

OpenAI sends another type of crawler when you ask it to analyze a specific URL, and only then.

Currently, this is either ChatGPT-User/1.0 or ChatGPT-User/2.0 for ChatGPT.