Do AI search engines crawl my site as often as Google does?

There is no published number for how often an AI crawler visits a site. OpenAI's crawler documentation describes what each bot is for, not how often it comes. The same goes for the other vendors' crawler pages. Any figure you see for an "average AI crawl rate" is a third party's snapshot of its own network, not a rule for your site.

So the honest answer to "as often as Google?" is: it depends on the bot, and you can only know by looking. Your server or CDN logs record every request with a user-agent, a timestamp and a status code. That record is the ground truth for your site.

The next move is to pull those logs and split them per bot. If you haven't done this before, start with how to see which AI bots crawl your site.

Each AI company runs several bots, and they do different jobs. Averaging them together hides what matters.

OpenAI states that its settings are independent: you can allow OAI-SearchBot for search while disallowing GPTBot for training. That's why a log full of GPTBot and empty of OAI-SearchBot is worth investigating, as covered in why logs show GPTBot but not OAI-SearchBot.

User-triggered fetchers don't follow a schedule at all. They show up when someone asks a question that sends the model to your page. OpenAI says robots.txt rules "may not apply" to ChatGPT-User, and Perplexity says Perplexity-User "generally ignores robots.txt rules." Treat those visits as demand signals, not crawl frequency.

For Google there is no separate AI crawler for AI Overviews. Google says robots.txt directives for Googlebot are the control, so Googlebot's crawl pattern is the one that matters there.

Work through your logs in this order.

1. Filter by user-agent. Pull requests for each named bot separately. Count visits per day and per URL.
2. Verify the bot is real. User-agent strings are easy to fake. OpenAI publishes IP ranges for OAI-SearchBot at openai.com/searchbot.json, and other vendors publish similar lists. OpenAI also warns against relying on IP alone, so match user-agent and IP together.
3. Check status codes. A 200 means the bot got the page. A 403, 429 or a challenge page means your firewall or CDN turned it away, even if robots.txt allows it.
4. Check which URLs it fetched. A bot that only ever hits your homepage and robots.txt has a different relationship with your site than one fetching product and pricing pages.
5. Note the date range. Patterns shift. A one-week sample is a snapshot.

Step 3 is usually the most valuable. Cloudflare changed its defaults on 15 September 2026, blocking Training and Agent crawlers by default on ad-displaying pages for new domains, new sites and existing free-tier customers. A site can lose AI access without anyone editing anything. The firewall testing playbook walks through confirming what each bot actually receives, and the AI Crawler Checker requests a page as each AI crawler and shows which ones get turned away.

IndexNow lets you tell search engines a URL has changed instead of waiting for a recrawl. As of the registry fetched in August 2026, it has seven consuming endpoints: Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google is not one of them.

The IndexNow specification never mentions AI, LLMs or Copilot. An HTTP 200 response confirms only that the ping was received. It guarantees nothing about indexing.

Microsoft has stated that IndexNow helps AI systems reference the current version of a page. That is a first-party assertion with no published study behind it. A plausible indirect path exists, since Bing's index backs Copilot, but nobody has measured its effect.

What this means: IndexNow is reasonable, free Bing hygiene. It does not make OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or Googlebot come sooner, and it is not a way to get cited faster.

More visits do not mean more citations. A crawl is an access event. Whether your page gets retrieved for a question, and then cited, happens later and depends on the engine.

Otterly's 2026 experiment shows the gap plainly. ChatGPT's crawlers kept visiting the two test sites, yet ChatGPT citations were effectively zero. Microsoft Copilot, which grounds on Bing, cited one site thousands of times. Otterly tracked 3,934 citations for that site, 2,718 of them from Copilot. Same crawl access, very different outcomes by engine. It's one pair of sites run by a vendor, so treat it as an illustration, not a law.

Training crawlers are a second trap. A training bot has no referral surface by design, so heavy GPTBot or ClaudeBot traffic tells you nothing about search visibility.

What's in your control is access: the right bots allowed in robots.txt, a firewall that doesn't block them, and content in the HTML before JavaScript runs. What isn't in your control is how often a bot visits or whether the engine cites you. If bots visit but you're never named, read why AI crawlers visit but never cite you.