And now we have it: ClaudeBot just made 958 requests.

Entry #8 — And now we have it: ClaudeBot just made 958 requests.

Entry details

Key findings

The data

All LLM bots (Mar 17–24, 2026)

| Bot | Requests | Category | Change vs. prior week | |---|---:|---|---| | ChatGPT-User | 1,154 | Citation | Stable (~1,200) | | ClaudeBot | 958 | Training | 8x (was 123) | | OpenAI SearchBot | 145 | index | Down from 328 | | ByteSpider | 91 | Training | Up from 69 | | PerplexityBot | 58 | index | Down from 511 | | OpenAI GPTBot | 37 | Training | Down from 171 | | Meta AI | 3 | Training | Down from 52 |

ClaudeBot content breakdown

| Content type | Requests | % | |---|---:|---:| | GEO Pages | 503 | 52.5% | | Q&A Pages | 162 | 16.9% | | Sitemap | 108 | 11.3% | | Robots.txt | 91 | 9.5% | | Other (topics) | 91 | 9.5% | | Homepage | 3 | 0.3% |

Compare this to last week’s ClaudeBot breakdown: 64% robots.txt/sitemap/topics, 0.8% GEO pages, 0% Q&A pages. The shift from structural monitoring to content ingestion happened in a single week.

ClaudeBot daily breakdown

| Date | ClaudeBot requests |

|---|---:|

| Mar 17 | 56 |

| Mar 18 | 13 |

| Mar 19 | 25 |

| Mar 20 | 577 |

| Mar 21 | 170 |

| Mar 22 | 74 |

| Mar 23 | 28 |

| Mar 24 | 15 |

March 20 is ClaudeBot’s version of the events we’ve now seen from every major crawler. GPTBot had January 7 (547 requests). PerplexityBot had March 10–15 (511 requests across several sessions). ClaudeBot had March 20 (577 requests in one day).

March 20, hour by hour

Monitoring loop Content crawl Sitemapindex deployed (15:57 UTC)

What we changed (and when) The ClaudeBot surge didn’t come from nothing. It followed two rounds of infrastructure changes, including one that likely triggered it.

The timeline

| Date | Event | |---|---| | Mar 9 | Content and navigation changes deployed (index, topics, featured Q&As) | | Mar 10 | PerplexityBot content burst (50+ pages in 20 seconds) | | Mar 14–15 | PerplexityBot Q&A deep dive + topic sweeps | | Mar 17 | Article 7 published: “PerplexityBot wakes up, Claude still waiting” | | Mar 20, 15:57 UTC | Per-topic sitemaps + simplified robots.txt deployed | | Mar 20, 22:00 UTC | ClaudeBot mass crawl begins: 523 requests in two hours | | Mar 21 | ClaudeBot follow-up: 170 requests |

We can’t prove the per-topic sitemap caused the crawl. But ClaudeBot is the bot that reads structure. It had been checking the old monolithic sitemap 15 times a week for months without crawling. On the day we replaced it with a topic-organized sitemapindex, six hours after deployment, ClaudeBot ran its largest content crawl since December.

The open question: where is Claude-SearchBot? ClaudeBot made 958 requests. Claude-SearchBot made 0.

This has been true for the entire observation period. Across 60 days of logs, Claude-SearchBot has never visited the AI site. Not once.

For context, OpenAI splits its crawler infrastructure into three bots with distinct roles:

Anthropic has ClaudeBot documented as the training/indexing crawler. Claude-SearchBot is documented as the bot that builds the retrieval index for Claude’s web search feature. We see ClaudeBot. We don’t see Claude-SearchBot.

Three possible explanations:

1. ClaudeBot handles both training and indexing.

2. Claude’s web uses a partner’s index.

3. Claude-SearchBot hasn’t activated for this domain yet.

The test is straightforward. If Claude’s citation rate for Genymotion improves in the next 2–3 weeks without any Claude-SearchBot traffic, explanation 1 is likely correct: ClaudeBot serves both purposes. If it doesn’t improve, the missing Claude-SearchBot may be the bottleneck. We’ll know by mid-April.

ChatGPT: still steady

Four consecutive weeks at ~1,200. ChatGPT is a reliable citation channel producing roughly 44 content sessions per day, with 40% involving multi-turn follow-up questions. The growth story has moved to other platforms.

PerplexityBot: post-indexing quiet

This is normal post-indexing behavior. GPTBot did the same thing after January 7: a mass crawl followed by weeks of 1–2 requests per day. PerplexityBot indexed the content. Now it’s monitoring for changes. The question is whether Perplexity citations start appearing in the next two weeks.

Where we are

Four platforms, four stages:

Three months ago we had one platform crawling. Now every major AI crawler has completed a deep indexing event on the same infrastructure. Same content, same Schema.org markup, same topic taxonomy. The bots arrive on their own schedules. The content was ready when they showed up.

Data source and author