AI Search is the New Battleground. Here's How to Win It.

Hey builders,

What questions are people asking ChatGPT about your industry and company?
And which of your web pages are AI systems learning from to answer them?

Most companies have no idea.

So we decided to find out.

When someone asks ChatGPT "What does Ghost Team do?" or "What agency can help me with AI Agents & Automation?”, the answer comes from AI crawlers visiting our site and building their "memory" of our brand.

This is why we built a tracking system to understand exactly what's happening.
Over 2 weeks, we logged 333 AI crawler visits across 40 pages.

The patterns are wild - and they reveal exactly how AI systems are learning about businesses.

Today I'm breaking down:

→ What AI bot crawlers actually do
→ The tracking system we built
→ The insights that are changing how we approach content
→ The AI Bot Crawler Insight Automation delivering insights to Slack weekly
→ How you can get set up with this system

Let's dive in.

What AI Bot Crawlers Actually Do

Think of AI bot crawlers as scouts gathering intelligence about your brand or reference content you’ve produced to answer user questions.

When ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini need to answer a question about your company, industry or a related topic, they're not making it up. They're referencing what their crawlers learned by visiting your website.

These bots:

→ Visit your pages to understand your positioning
→ Extract content to build their "memory" of your brand
→ Return periodically to update their knowledge
→ Use what they learn to answer user queries about you

Here is what the data looks like:

The problem? Most companies have zero visibility into this process. They don't know which pages are being crawled, what bots are visiting, or how AI is representing them. Some companies don’t even know it’s happening.

We built a system to change that.

The Tracking System We Built

We set up bot detection that captures:

→ Which AI systems visit (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, Bingbot, etc.)
→ Which pages they access
→ When they visit
→ How they crawl (patterns and behaviour)

Think of it as Google Analytics for AI bots.

Over 2 weeks, we captured 333 AI crawler visits across 40 pages.

Here's what the data revealed:

Insight #1: The Homepage Monopoly

25.8% of ALL AI traffic goes to our homepage.

ChatGPT-User specifically spends 44.9% of its time there.

This isn't true for every business, but if you're early stage without massive content libraries, this is where AI forms its first impression.

What this means for you:

→ Your homepage must be extremely accessible / crawlable by LLMs
→ Your value proposition needs to be crystal clear
→ Any ambiguity here = LLMs misrepresenting what you do

If AI can't understand your homepage, it can't accurately tell users what you do.

Insight #2: Hidden Gems Getting Discovered

One of our detailed resources about building AI apps gets 10.2% of all AI traffic - second only to the homepage.

Long, technical, in-depth content is a magnet for AI crawlers.

This makes sense when you think about it:

→ LLMs need substantive content to learn from
→ Thin pages don't give them enough to work with
→ Detailed resources = citation-worthy content

The pages you think nobody reads? AI crawlers might be obsessing over them.

Insight #3: They Come in Bursts

AI crawlers don't visit randomly. They work in clusters.

Here's what we're seeing:

→ GPTBot: 96% burst activity (crawls multiple pages rapidly)
→ ChatGPT-User: 65.4% burst activity (user queries trigger exploration)
→ Bingbot: 48.6% steady (more consistent crawling)

When a bot lands on your site, you have a brief window - seconds - where it explores multiple pages.

Your internal linking strategy is part of determining how much the bot learns about you.

This is huge. If a bot lands on your homepage but can't easily navigate to your most important content, it leaves with an incomplete picture.

We're now exploring ways to guide them from our homepage to our most important pages.

We’ll be testing how this impacts bot crawler activity and will share our learnings with you.

The AI Bot Crawler Insight Automation

Having the AI bot crawler set up was great, but manually reviewing crawler data was a nightmare. So we automated it.

Every Monday, an n8n workflow:

1️⃣ Pulls the latest crawler data from our database

2️⃣ Filters for significant activity patterns

3️⃣ AI analyses trends and anomalies

4️⃣ Generates a formatted report

5️⃣ Sends it directly to Slack (or Telegram)

Now we see insights like:

Traffic concentration: 
→ Which pages AI is obsessing over
→ Where ChatGPT-User spends most time
→ Hidden content attracting crawler attention

Crawl patterns: 
→ GPTBot burst activity timing
→ When bots are most active
→ Which pages they explore after landing

Strategic gaps: 
→ Important pages being ignored
→ Internal linking opportunities
→ Content that needs optimisation

This happens without us lifting a finger and helps us stay on the pulse of the changes happening week on week.

Why This Matters Now

We're in the era of AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), not just SEO.

As people shift from Google to AI assistants, your "AI reputation" affects customer acquisition.

The more you understand how these crawlers work, the more you can optimise your content to ensure AI crawlers:

→ Actually find you
→ Represent you accurately
→ Surface your most important content

You can't optimise for AEO without understanding how AI systems are learning about your brand.

Getting Started

We’ve created a full guide on getting started, in includes:

→ Full guide on setting up AI bot crawler tracking
→ n8n JSON file automating weekly insights to Slack/Telegram

FULL GUIDE HERE.

It’s a bit technical, but well worth doing to get these unique insights for your brand. If you need help, feel free to email me: [email protected] or contact me on LinkedIn.

These are just the first insights we have from this data, we’ll continue to share more as we gather more data and we take actions to improve our LLM visibility.

Feel free to drop me a reply with feedback or questions.

Happy building,

Elliot

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