Bot (Robot) is the general name for software programs that perform automated tasks on the internet. In the context of SEO, the term bot is most often used synonymously with crawler, but the bot ecosystem is much broader.
Bot categories relevant to SEO:
- Search engine bots: Googlebot, Bingbot, YandexBot. They crawl pages to index them.
- AI bots: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended. They crawl for AI training data and LLM responses.
- Social media bots: FacebookExternalHit, Twitterbot, LinkedInBot. They crawl for share previews (unfurl).
- SEO tool bots: AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, MJ12bot. They crawl for Backlink and ranking analysis.
- Spam and malicious bots: Content scraping, brute-force logins, form spam.
In modern SEO, how AI bots should be handled is a strategic decision. If you want to participate in AI training, access is left open; if you do not want your content copied, it is blocked with robots.txt.
Tip: Analyze server logs to see which bots visit your site and how often. Excessive spam bot traffic can consume your server resources.