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Adsense

The AdSense crawler visits participating sites in order to provide them with relevant ads.
Adsense
AdvertisingSearch Engine Crawler

What is Adsense?

Adsense is a search engine crawler. The AdSense crawler visits participating sites in order to provide them with relevant ads.

Adsense powers a search engine, and search indexes increasingly feed AI answers and overviews alongside classic results. The pages it can crawl are the pages eligible to rank and to be pulled into AI-generated summaries, so allowing it protects both your SEO and your AI search visibility.

Like any automated client, Adsense consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle Adsense

Most sites keep Adsense allowed, because blocking it can remove your pages from the AI answers and search results it powers. Only disallow it if you specifically want to opt out of that surface.

To control Adsense, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Adsense
Disallow: /

Adsense generally honors robots.txt directives.

Examples

  • After publishing a new comparison page, a marketer checks whether Adsense has fetched it so the content can appear in AI answers.
  • An SEO lead keeps Adsense allowed in robots.txt to preserve visibility in AI-powered search.

Related bots

AdIdxBot

AdIdxBot is the crawler used by Bing Ads for quality control of ads and their destination websites. It has multiple user agent variants including desktop, iPhone, and Windows Phone versions.

Search Engine Crawler

Algolia

The Algolia Crawler extracts content from your site and makes it searchable.

Search Engine Crawler

Amazon AdBot

Amazon AdBot is a crawler used by different advertising services at Amazon to determine a website's content in order to provide relevant and appropriate advertising.

Search Engine Crawler

Amazon Product Discovery

Amazon's web crawler used to collect publicly available product details from Amazon Selling Partner websites to help improve the accuracy and completeness of product information on Amazon.

Search Engine Crawler

APIs-Google

Crawling preferences addressed to the APIs-Google user agent affect the delivery of push notification messages by Google APIs.

Search Engine Crawler

Frequently asked questions about Adsense

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Adsense is a search engine crawler; its operator is identified in its user-agent string and public documentation.

Be the brand AI recommends

Monitor your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Get actionable insights and create content that gets cited by AI search engines.

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