--- title: How Your Website Handles Search Engine and AI Crawler Traffic description: How Your Website Handles Search Engine and AI Crawler Traffic A large share of the visits to your website aren't people. They're automated programs —… --- [Skip to content](https://help.punchmark.com/knowledgebase/wiki/spaces/punchmark/pages/3241017355#main-content) English Show submenu for translations [![punchmark-logo-horizontal-white](https://help.punchmark.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Punchmark%20Branding/punchmark-logo-horizontal-white.png?width=225&height=38&name=punchmark-logo-horizontal-white.png)](https://academy.punchmark.com/knowledge?hsLang=en) - [Website](https://www.punchmark.com/) - [News](https://www.punchmark.com/news) - [Support](https://www.punchmark.com/contact-support) - [In the Loupe](https://www.punchmark.com/loupe) Open main navigation Close main navigation - [Website](https://www.punchmark.com/) - [News](https://www.punchmark.com/news) - [Support](https://www.punchmark.com/contact-support) - [In the Loupe](https://www.punchmark.com/loupe) - English Show submenu for translations - Go to punchmark.com Go to punchmark.com Hello. How can we help you? - There are no suggestions because the search field is empty. 1. [Punchmark Knowledge Base](https://help.punchmark.com/knowledgebase?hsLang=en) 2. [FAQs](https://help.punchmark.com/knowledgebase/faqs?hsLang=en) 3. [Website Management](https://help.punchmark.com/knowledgebase/faqs?hsLang=en#website-management) # How Your Website Handles Search Engine and AI Crawler Traffic ## How Your Website Handles Search Engine and AI Crawler Traffic A large share of the visits to your website aren't people. They're automated programs — search engines indexing your products, AI companies gathering training data, SEO tools, uptime monitors, and scrapers. On a typical Punchmark site these automated visits significantly outnumber human shoppers. This article explains what we're doing about that, and — most importantly — why it doesn't affect your search rankings or your customers. --- ## The short version - We're measuring how much server work goes to automated crawlers rather than real shoppers. - **Nothing about your website has changed.** This is measurement only right now. - **Your search engine visibility is not affected.** Google, Bing, and Apple always receive your complete pages. - The goal is to spend your server capacity on the people who might actually buy something. ## Why this matters for your store Every time any visitor opens one of your product pages — human or robot — your site does real work: looking up related products to recommend, assembling the available metal types and ring sizes, and more. That work is worth doing for a shopper who might add something to their cart. An automated crawler will never add anything to a cart. When a large volume of that traffic arrives at once, it competes for the same server capacity your actual customers are using. The idea here is straightforward: recognize which visits are automated and which of those don't need the full treatment, so your store's resources go to your shoppers. ## Will this hurt my SEO? **No.** This is the question we get most, so here's exactly how it's handled. Search engines are the most protected category on the platform. Two things make that true: **We never take a crawler's word for who it is.** Any program on the internet can *claim* to be Googlebot simply by saying so — it's a single line of text that anyone can copy. Because of that, claiming to be a search engine is never by itself enough to receive anything less than your full page. **When we're unsure, you get the full page.** The system is deliberately built to err toward serving everything. If there's any doubt about who a visitor is, they get the complete page — the safe outcome, every time. The result: Google, Bing, and Apple see your pages exactly as they always have. Your titles, descriptions, page addresses, product data, and structured data are untouched in every scenario. ## What about AI? It's worth separating two very different things that both get called "AI traffic": **A person using an AI assistant.** Someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity about your store, and the assistant opens your page to answer them. **That's a real customer**, and it's treated exactly like any other human visit — the full page, always, no exceptions. These are increasingly how people discover stores, and we protect them accordingly. **Bulk training crawlers.** An AI company systematically downloading large portions of the web to train a model. No one is reading your page at the other end of that request. This is the kind of traffic the feature is aimed at. The platform tells these apart and treats them very differently. ## Will my products still look right when someone shares a link? Yes. When your pages are shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, or elsewhere, the preview keeps the title, description, and image it needs to display properly. ## What will I actually notice? **Right now, nothing at all.** The current release only measures; it doesn't change how any page is served, to anyone. Once we begin acting on those measurements, the only visitors affected are automated ones — a crawler might not be sent extras like the "similar items" strip. **Your customers' experience is identical.** If anything, freeing up capacity that was being spent on crawlers means a more responsive site for the people actually shopping. We roll changes like this out gradually and watch the results as we go. ## Questions? If you have questions about how this affects your store, contact Punchmark support and we'll walk you through it. - [Default HubSpot Blog](https://blog.punchmark.com/blog) [![pm-symbol-blue](https://help.punchmark.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Punchmark%20Branding/pm-symbol-blue.png?width=40&height=45&name=pm-symbol-blue.png "pm-symbol-blue")](https://academy.punchmark.com/knowledge?hsLang=en) Punchmark Resource Center Copyright © 2026, Punchmark