Assistant fetcher

An AI assistant fetching a page in real time because a person asked it something, such as ChatGPT-User or Claude-User. Each visit stands in for a customer.

Why it matters

An assistant fetcher is the closest thing to a customer in your agent traffic: each visit is a person asking a question that your page could answer. If bot protection turns it away or the page needs JavaScript it doesn't run, that person gets an answer built from someone else's site. These are the agent visits to protect first.

More terms in the agents

• AI agent Software that uses an AI model to do something on the web for a person or a company: read a page, answer a question, compare products or complete a task.
• Training crawler A bot that collects pages to train AI models, such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot.
• AI search crawler A bot that indexes pages so AI search and assistants can cite and link to them, such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
• Browser agent An agent that opens your site in a real browser and clicks, types and scrolls like a person, to book, sign up or buy.
• User agent The name a visitor sends with every request to say what it is, such as a browser version or GPTBot.

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