GlossaryUpdated 2026-09-21
Crawl
A crawl is a program requesting a URL. For an AI crawler it proves that a request naming that provider reached your server — and, if the request passes the provider's documented check, that the provider fetched the page. It does not show that anything was used.
How it differs from retrieval and citation
A crawl can happen for any reason: building an index, refreshing a cache, testing. Retrieval is a fetch for a specific question; citation is the page appearing in an answer. On our own pages, 2,743 were fetched by verified crawlers and 42 were later cited by the same provider (study).
Where this was measured
Related
← All terms