🤖 AI Crawler Cost Calculator

Estimate how much GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Meta-ExternalAgent, and Bytespider are adding to your hosting bill.

Free · No signup · Instant results

Your Traffic & Infrastructure

Monthly unique page requests (not sessions)
HTML + assets per page (avg developer site: 300–600 KB)
Bandwidth/egress rate for your setup
Reported range: 5–30% for developer-facing sites (default: 12%)

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Monthly AI crawler bill
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Annual AI crawler bill
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AI crawler visits/month
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AI crawler bandwidth/month

Breakdown by Crawler

Crawler Operator Est. visits/mo Est. cost/mo Share

Know exactly which bot is responsible — in real time

This calculator estimates costs from traffic averages. CrawlGuard identifies your actual per-bot spend, fires alerts when a crawler spikes, and lets you block it in one click.

Get early access to CrawlGuard → Check if your site is blocking crawlers

How is this calculated?

Where does the 12% default crawler fraction come from?

Multiple 2025–2026 analyses of CDN access logs from developer-facing sites show AI training crawlers accounting for 5–30% of total HTTP requests. 12% is a conservative mid-range estimate. Sites with large content libraries (documentation, blogs) tend toward the higher end.

Why don't AI crawlers show up as a line item in my Vercel/AWS bill?

CDN and hosting providers bill for total bandwidth and requests — they don't break down which user-agent generated which traffic. You'd need access log analysis or a specialized monitor (like CrawlGuard) to attribute costs to specific bots.

How are the per-crawler percentages determined?

Shares are based on reported incident data and crawl-frequency analysis from 2025–2026. Meta-ExternalAgent and GPTBot are typically the heaviest hitters for English-language developer content. Bytespider (ByteDance) appears less frequently but crawls aggressively when active. ClaudeBot is generally well-behaved and respects crawl delays.

Does blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt eliminate these costs?

Major crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot officially claim to respect robots.txt. In practice, compliance varies and enforcement isn't guaranteed. Infrastructure-level blocking (Cloudflare, nginx rate limits) provides stronger cost protection — but still requires knowing which bots to target. Check your current blocking status →

My site uses Cloudflare — does this affect the calculation?

Cloudflare Pro/Business/Enterprise plans include free bandwidth, so CDN egress cost may be $0. But Cloudflare still counts requests toward your plan limits, and origin bandwidth (if your server handles cache misses) still costs money. Set CDN cost to $0 and check "origin server cost" manually if applicable.

Also check: AI Crawler Check tool · Block configs (Nginx, Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS) · Developer blog