Bluehost data: 83.4m AI crawler requests a day, but only 1% fetch live answers
Bluehost's parent company Newfold Digital has published a 90-day analysis of AI crawler activity across the sites it hosts, counting 83.4 million verified AI crawler requests per day. CEO Sachin Puri said the figure should not be read as customer discovery: by Bluehost's classification, roughly 90% of those requests were for model training, about 9% for search indexing, and around 1% for live assistant fetching.
For ChatGPT and OpenAI specifically, Bluehost estimated one observable referral visit for every 5,350 verified HTML crawl requests. Puri said that ratio is not a conversion rate, since the crawl count includes training activity and Bluehost cannot see every customer journey an AI assistant influences.
Puri's argument is that the website's job has changed rather than disappeared. An AI agent asked to find and book an electrician, for example, may never send the customer to the electrician's homepage, but it still needs the business's location, licensing, pricing, reviews and availability. It can pull those from the site's schema markup, its Google Business Profile, its Yelp listing and third-party reviews, which is why Puri treats the website as the reference point the rest of a business's digital presence should match.
He proposed measuring AI visibility in three parts: whether the business appears in answers, whether the information in those answers is accurate, and whether the answer leads to a booking or purchase. A separate Bluehost study found only 13% of small businesses said they were optimising for search assistant visibility. Puri's suggested starting point is ten minutes a day asking an assistant the questions a customer would ask, without naming the company, then checking which competitors appear and which sources the assistant cites.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: ChatGPT, Citations, Measurement