Bluehost says AI crawlers made 83.4 million daily hits across its sites

A page gets crawled by an AI company's bot thousands of times before any user clicks through, if a user clicks through at all. Search Engine Journal reports Newfold Digital CEO Sachin Puri as giving a number: in a 90-day Bluehost analysis across the sites Bluehost hosts, verified AI crawler requests ran at 83.4 million per day.

Reporter Loren Baker quotes Puri on the breakdown. By Bluehost's own classification, Puri told Search Engine Journal, roughly 90 percent of those requests were for model training, about 9 percent for search indexing, and roughly 1 percent for live assistant fetching, the kind of request a chatbot makes when a user asks it a question that needs a page open on the web.

One referral for every 5,350 crawl requests

Puri gave Search Engine Journal a second figure a page owner can test for themselves. For ChatGPT and OpenAI specifically, Bluehost's report estimated one observable referral visit back to a site for every 5,350 verified HTML crawl requests the two services made against that site. The report Puri quoted is not named in the article, so other outlets citing it will have to ask Bluehost for the source document to reproduce the number against a different sample.

The "crawl to refer" number is a contested one in GEO reporting, because different analysts count both halves of it differently and pick different windows. Puri's version is Bluehost's measurement across Bluehost-hosted sites in a 90-day window, so a reader has to take it as the host's own view rather than a measurement that would apply to a site hosted elsewhere.

Small-business awareness and action

Search Engine Journal attributes two more numbers to Puri, both from what the piece calls Bluehost's small business AI confidence study. Only 13 percent of the small businesses in the study said they were optimising for search assistant visibility. Puri said separately that 79 percent of the small businesses Bluehost researched were aware of AI agents, while 16 percent said they had deployed one.

The gap between awareness and deployment is the practical point of the piece. Baker frames the shift as a website doing a second job alongside attracting human visitors: giving an AI agent accurate, machine-readable facts about the business so the agent can quote the page in an answer or recommend the business in a reply.

What the piece asks a team to measure

Puri gave Search Engine Journal three measurements he says a small business owner should check now. Visibility, which is whether the business appears in the answers an AI assistant gives for a question it should appear in. Accuracy, which is whether the information the assistant gives, such as price, hours and the services on offer, matches what the business actually publishes. And action, which is whether that exposure turns into a booking or a sale.

Baker ends on Puri's own one-line version of the shift: AI is changing the job a website does. All five figures in the piece come from Bluehost's own analysis of Bluehost's own hosted sites, so another host, another sample window, or another definition of a verified crawl could move each one. The piece is the host's own account, which is the context a reader should keep when quoting the figures.

Source

AI Search Is Changing Your Website's Job, Here's How To Adapt, by Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal.