
Fake AI crawlers are scanning for Claude and OpenAI API keys
We checked every visit that arrived with an AI crawler name against the address lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Perplexity publish. More than a third were not who they said.
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We checked every visit that arrived with an AI crawler name against the address lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Perplexity publish. More than a third were not who they said.

Of the combinations where a brand appeared at least once, 80.4% were inconsistent. On those, a single check agrees with the majority verdict only 72.2% of the time.

We ran a controlled before-and-after on our own tracked set, same brands and same questions in both windows. ChatGPT’s Reddit citations collapsed. Perplexity and Gemini did not follow.

Reddit fell from 34.4 percent of ChatGPT answers to 3.2 percent in a single week in August 2026. Government and regulatory sources more than tripled to fill the space, and everything else shrank.

I blocked one page in robots.txt and asked eight AI assistants to read it. Three said no, three read it anyway, and two never showed up. The split is not what I expected.

Ask an AI the same buyer question repeatedly and the cited sources shift. We measured how much they change between checks, and it turns on the engine and the question.

We logged about 26,400 AI answers across five assistants. Brands were cited or named in only 16 percent. Here is the per-engine split and why.

We classified 151,000 sources five AI engines actually cited. The open web dominates every engine, but the leans differ: YouTube on Google AI Mode, forums on ChatGPT, almost neither on Claude.

We analyzed almost 100,000 AI citations across five platforms. Of the outside sources AI cites about a brand, around 40 percent are its competitors.

An experiment across about 16,400 AI answers and 127,198 source citations from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The five engines agree on just 2.7% of sources, and Gemini cites three times more than ChatGPT.

Google Search is moving from links to answers, agents, and generated interfaces. That changes what web visibility means.

I ran an nginx probe against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and Manus to see what each assistant actually sends when it fetches your page. Real user-agents, real Accept headers, real vendor blind spots.
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