ANSWERS

How often do AI crawlers visit a typical site?

There's no universal crawl rate. Frequency varies with provider priorities, your server's capacity to serve requests, and how discoverable your pages are. You measure it in your own server or CDN logs over a fixed date window, bot by bot. ye5's GEO Web audit checks whether machines can reach and read your site.

What determines how often a crawler returns

Crawl rate isn't fixed. It shifts with a handful of measurable factors. The same factors drive traditional search crawling, extended to AI bots that map content for their own answers.

—Site size. More discoverable pages can draw more requests.
—Update frequency. Pages that change often may get revisited sooner.
—Internal linking and sitemap freshness. Crawlers follow links and sitemaps to find what changed.
—robots.txt directives. Allow and disallow rules change which bots reach your site.
—Domain authority and inbound links. Established sites tend to draw more crawl attention.
—Provider priorities. Each provider decides what to fetch and how often.
—Server capacity. Your site's ability to serve requests shapes the rate a crawler sustains.

How to measure crawl frequency on your own site

Pick a fixed date window and read your own server or CDN logs, since no published figure sets what a site should expect.

—Choose a fixed date window and hold it steady across comparisons.
—Verify bot identity rather than trusting the user-agent string.
—Group requests by bot, path, timestamp, and HTTP status.
—Separate robots.txt and sitemap.xml requests from successful content fetches.
—Separate search, training, and user-triggered agents.

claude-user and chatgpt-user aren't periodic crawlers. They fire in real time, when a live conversation asks an assistant to open a page. ClaudeBot's own recrawl pattern is measured separately (see: What is ClaudeBot?). You can pull these same categories from your own server logs (see: How do I check which AI bots visit my site?).

Why the number matters less than access

A high request count doesn't mean a bot could read what it found. Crawlers can hit a page and still fail on JavaScript-rendered content, blocked paths, or missing structure. A request does not prove the content was read successfully, used in training, or cited in an answer. Volume measures attempts, not outcomes.

ye5's GEO Web audit diagnoses site access and readability, not log monitoring. It looks for the structural gaps that decide whether a crawler's visit produces usable content. Reachability is a separate question from block-or-allow strategy (see: Should I block AI crawlers from my site?).

FAQ

Does more crawler traffic mean better AI visibility?

No. A request does not prove the content was read successfully, used in training, or cited in an answer. A page can draw frequent crawls and never surface in a response, or draw fewer visits and still get cited when a query matches its content.

Why do user-triggered agents appear less often than training crawlers?

User-triggered agents fetch a page only when a live conversation asks for one, so their requests depend on real conversations. Training and search crawlers run on their own schedules, independent of any single session, which is why their request counts tend to be higher.

Does crawl frequency change as a site grows?

It can. More pages, more frequent updates, and more inbound links can draw more crawl activity over time. Provider priorities and your server's capacity to serve requests also decide the rate, so growth alone does not settle it.