GPTBot vs Claude-Web: Comprehensive AI Crawler Technology Comparison

Executive Summary

OpenAI's GPTBot and Anthropic's Claude-Web are two of the busiest AI-focused crawlers on the modern internet. While both gather training data for large language models, their operational philosophy, technical footprints, and compliance posture differ in meaningful ways. Understanding those differences helps site owners craft policies that welcome beneficial traffic while protecting proprietary assets.

Identity and Discovery

| User-Agent Pattern | \ GPTBot (+https://openai.com/gptbot) | \ Claude-Web (+https://www.anthropic.com/claude-web) |

Crawl Strategy

• GPTBot prioritizes breadth, sampling a wide set of domains to reduce bias. It respects crawl-delay directives and aggressively deduplicates content.
• Claude-Web favors depth on authoritative sources, revisiting technical or policy-heavy domains more frequently.

crawl_profiles:
  gptbot:
    politeness: moderate
    focus: broad coverage
    refresh_interval: 5-7 days
  claude_web:
    politeness: high
    focus: authoritative domains
    refresh_interval: 3-5 days

Technical Fingerprints

• ASNs & IP Ranges: GPTBot frequently operates from OpenAI-managed ranges and Microsoft Azure infrastructure. Claude-Web predominantly appears on AWS.
• TLS Fingerprints: Both use modern TLS stacks; Claude-Web rotates ciphers more frequently to match consumer browsers.
• Request Headers: GPTBot includes Accept: text/html,/;q=0.8 while Claude-Web advertises Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9 to aid localization.

Compliance and Ethics

Both vendors provide safe-list request mechanisms, but they diverge in transparency:

• GPTBot publishes a removal tool, ensuring rapid opt-out.
• Claude-Web emphasizes collaborative indexing; site owners can provide structured feeds.

Impact on Site Strategy

1. Structured Data

- GPTBot makes heavy use of JSON-LD schemas. Provide article, organization, and FAQ markup. - Claude-Web improves summarization when pages offer section anchors and table-of-contents metadata.

1. Robots.txt Policies

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /private/

User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /blog/
Disallow: /pricing/internal/

1. Content Freshness

- GPTBot rewards frequently updated content with quicker recrawls. - Claude-Web prioritizes authoritative revisions—highlight update logs and changelogs.

Monitoring Recommendations

• Track crawler hit rates by ASN to differentiate legitimate traffic from spoofed user-agents.
• Deploy honeypot URLs to confirm compliance; both crawlers respect disallow directives.
• Provide explicit sitemap locations to accelerate discovery of new sections.

Final Thoughts

The optimal approach is collaborative. Offer machine-readable guidance, provide rich contextual metadata, and monitor access patterns. With clear policies in place, GPTBot and Claude-Web become valuable partners that amplify high-quality content instead of destabilizing infrastructure.