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AI SearchCrawler Logs

Crawler Logs

Crawler Logs shows you when AI crawlers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google, and others visit your website, and which pages they read. It turns raw bot traffic into a clear view of which pages AI systems fetch, and when.

Accessing Crawler Logs

Go to AI Search → Crawler Logs in the sidebar.

What Crawler Logs Shows You

AI-powered search is changing how people discover content. Crawler Logs helps you understand:

  • Which AI bots are crawling your site - GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others
  • Live retrieval traffic - when ChatGPT or Perplexity fetch a page in real time to answer a question
  • Which pages AI search engines read - what content AI finds valuable
  • Fetch patterns - which pages AI systems fetch, and when

Different AI tools behave differently. ChatGPT fetches pages in real time when answering queries, while Perplexity often uses pre-indexed content from background crawls. Crawler logs show fetches, not citations: to see where AI answers cite you, use Citations.

Setup

Choose your platform to get started:

WordPress

If your site is connected through the WordPress integration, Asky can import your server logs once a day through that connection. No extra credentials or code are needed. The WordPress connection is available on Scale and above.

Daily log imports work on supported hosts. SiteGround is supported, including requests served from its cache. Asky checks whether your host is compatible before it turns anything on.

Connect WordPress

Connect your self-hosted site in Connections. When you connect, Asky checks whether your host’s logs are readable and turns on daily imports if they are.

Check the WordPress tab

Go to AI Search → Crawler Logs, click Setup Instructions, and open the WordPress tab. It shows whether daily tracking is active. If it is not on yet, click Enable now.

Wait for the first import

Asky imports up to 30 days of available history, newest first, and visits appear as they are imported. After that, new server logs are imported automatically each day.

Because the logs arrive once a day, WordPress imports are not live: a visit shows up after the host publishes that day’s log. For visits within seconds, use the Cloudflare Worker or a custom server integration.

To stop importing, click Disable daily logs on the same tab. Visits already imported stay in Asky.

Detected Bots

Asky automatically detects and categorizes the following AI crawlers:

BotDisplayed AsCompanyType
GPTBotGPTBot (OpenAI)OpenAITraining crawler
ChatGPT-UserChatGPT Citations (OpenAI)OpenAILive retrieval
OAI-SearchBotOAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)OpenAISearch indexing
ClaudeBotClaudeBot (Anthropic)AnthropicTraining crawler
Claude-UserClaude Citations (Anthropic)AnthropicLive retrieval
PerplexityBotPerplexityBot (Perplexity)PerplexityCrawler
Perplexity-UserPerplexity Citations (Perplexity)PerplexityLive retrieval
GooglebotGooglebot (Google)GoogleSearch crawler
BingbotBingbot (Microsoft)MicrosoftSearch crawler

Some Google tokens, like Google-Extended (the Gemini-training opt-out) and Googlebot-News, are robots.txt control tokens only. They have no distinct HTTP user-agent, so they govern crawling preferences but never appear as visits in Crawler Logs. For Google you’ll typically see Googlebot (and, when they crawl, variants such as Googlebot-Image, GoogleOther, and Google-CloudVertexBot).

Troubleshooting

No Data Appearing

  1. Check your Domain ID - verify you are using the correct UUID from your Asky dashboard
  2. Check logs - look for errors in your platform’s logs (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, etc.)
  3. Wait a moment - data may take a few seconds to appear

403 Domain Mismatch Error

If you see 403 errors, the host field does not match the domain registered with your Domain ID.

  1. Ensure host is included in your log payload
  2. Check your domain registration - the hostname must exactly match (e.g., example.com vs www.example.com)
  3. Handle www variants - normalize the hostname: host.replace(/^www\./, '')

High Request Volume

The tracking runs on every request. To reduce volume:

  • Add more static file extensions to the skip list
  • Skip paths that do not need tracking (like /api/*)
  • Consider only tracking specific paths you care about

Next Steps

  • See which of your pages AI crawlers visit in Pages
  • Read the answers those crawls help inform in Responses

Need help setting up crawler tracking? Reach out at hello@askylabs.com.

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