GPTBot hit a site 2M times. Blocking it changed Google crawl by exactly zero.

GPTBot hit a site 2M times. Blocking it changed Google crawl by exactly zero.

New myth worth killing with data: that AI crawlers eat your "Google crawl budget." A publisher saw GPTBot and CCBot logging 2 million requests a month and panicked that it was starving Googlebot.

They're separate crawlers with separate infrastructure and separate scheduling. Google's crawl budget is Google's alone — no other bot draws from it.

The site blocked GPTBot and CCBot in robots.txt (a content-licensing choice, fair enough). Server load dropped meaningfully. Googlebot's crawl rate and the site's indexation: unchanged, before and after, to the request.

Here's the thing — there is no shared crawl budget across companies. That's not how it works.

Block AI crawlers for licensing reasons if you want. Just don't pretend it helps your Google crawl. It does nothing.