Meta Dominates AI Crawling but Sends Zero User-Initiated Traffic, Data Shows

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A web developer tracking AI crawler activity on a small WordPress site found that Meta accounted for 52.3% of all AI crawler visits over 30 days ending September 11, more than all other AI companies combined. Of Meta's 6,182 recorded requests, 6,027 came from its training data crawler, while only 155 came from its answer-quality indexer and none from its user-initiated fetcher. By contrast, Perplexity directed 93% of its crawl traffic from live user queries, and OpenAI 21%, meaning those crawlers are more likely to drive actual readers back to the source. Meta does publish documentation for its crawlers and maintains a user-initiated fetcher in principle, but on this site that tool recorded zero activity across the entire month. The author also noted that Meta publishes no IP ranges or reverse-DNS data, making it impossible to independently verify that any of the requests genuinely originated from the company.

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