AI Assistants Are Rewriting How Brands Show Up – And Blocking Bots May Be Making It Worse

As companies rush to block AI bots, data suggests they may be pushing pricing, brand messaging, and customer decisions into AI systems beyond their control.

Vilnius, Lithuania — Companies trying to protect their content from artificial intelligence may be weakening their control over how customers see their brands. A new analysis by Hostinger, a no-code AI Agent-driven platform for building and growing online businesses, reveals a rapid expansion of AI assistant crawlers – the systems used by tools like ChatGPT and Siri to summarize, compare, and recommend products. This expansion is occurring even as businesses are aggressively blocking bots designed for AI training. The analysis is based on 66.7 billion verified bot interactions across 5 million websites.

The result: AI assistants are reading and summarizing more business websites, even as companies reduce their ability to influence how those systems understand and present them.

For decades, the commercial internet ran on a predictable model. Search engines indexed websites and sent users back. Brands controlled pricing context, messaging, and attribution inside owned channels. That model is breaking. AI assistants increasingly answer questions directly, replacing visits with summaries and recommendations. Discovery no longer guarantees traffic – and often ends before a website is reached.

Hostinger’s data shows this shift accelerating. Over a five-month period, OpenAI’s SearchBot expanded from 52% to 68% of websites, while Applebot doubled from 17% to 34%. Traditional search crawlers remained broadly stable, indicating that AI is not replacing search but adding a new decision layer above it.

Blocking AI – just not the right kind

At the same time, companies are sharply restricting access by AI model-training crawlers. OpenAI’s GPTBot fell from 84% website coverage in August to just 12% by November. Meta’s ExternalAgent dropped from 60% to 41%.

Hostinger’s analysis shows that training crawlers and assistant crawlers serve different roles, but are often treated as the same.

Training crawlers collect data to improve AI models over time. Assistant crawlers fetch content in real time to answer user queries. Blocking the former does not stop the latter from summarizing, ranking, or recommending a company’s products and services.

The net effect is that AI assistants are mediating more customer decisions, while companies have fewer signals shaping how those systems learn from their content.

As AI assistants increasingly mediate discovery and comparison, companies are losing control over more than traffic:

• Pricing context, as AI responses summarize offers without full commercial nuance
• Brand safety, as messaging is reframed outside approved guidelines
• Advertising effectiveness, as paid acquisition loses visibility upstream
• Ecommerce attribution, as customer journeys end inside AI interfaces

These risks affect marketing teams first, but extend quickly into revenue forecasting, compliance, and operations.

From blocking to governance

Some companies are beginning to adjust, moving from blanket blocking toward selective AI governance – explicitly managing how AI assistants access and interpret content, while still restricting bots that pose cost or IP risks.

That includes tools such as llms.txt, a machine-readable file that guides AI assistants to authoritative pages and priorities, and AI-ready site interfaces that expose current, structured content rather than inferred summaries.

“With AI assistants increasingly answering questions directly, the web is shifting from a click-driven model to an agent-mediated one,” said Tomas Rasymas, Head of AI at Hostinger. “The real risk for businesses isn’t AI access itself, but losing control over how pricing, positioning, and value are presented when decisions are made.”

Methodology

Hostinger analyzed 66.7 billion anonymized log entries from 5 million websites, collected during three six-day windows in June, August, and November 2025. Only verified crawler traffic was included, classified using publicly documented user agents, observed behavior patterns, and open-source AI crawler registries. Human traffic and unrelated noise were excluded. Complete analysis is published here. 

About Hostinger

Hostinger is a global all-in-one operating layer for businesses building and running online products. The company combines web hosting, domains, email, website and web-app creation, and business tools in a single environment, with artificial intelligence embedded across its products and operations. Hostinger develops its AI capabilities in-house, enabling rapid product iteration, automation of complex technical tasks, and AI-driven customer support.

Media contact:

Eiviltas Paraščiakas

Head of Communications | Hostinger 
P: +37061111694
E: eiviltas.parasciakas@hostinger.com
W: www.hostinger.com