Bots and Agents - What's the Difference?

As we adjust to the inevitability of AI in our everyday lives, you hear the terms AI "bot" and AI "agent" thrown around. Are they the same thing? In a word, no.

Who cares? Well, if you have a website and you want your products or services to be findable by customers, you need to manage how your site handles different kinds of visitors in the age of AI.

So what's the difference between a bot and an agent?

The big AI systems, like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). And the automation around those models has many functions. Some of the automation gathers up all the info it can find on the open internet and reports what it finds back to home base. Also called crawlers, these bots are not managed directly by humans. They're more like Roomba vacuums for the Internet.

The big LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., send bots out to visit websites and read the content. Those bots are building a picture of the world. They are not shopping, nor are they looking for your business, specifically. They are just collecting information so the LLMs can see what is out there.

An agent is different. An agent is sent to your website on behalf of a specific person with a specific question. Let's say "Dustin" opened his Claude app and said, "Find me a climbing gym in Denver with late hours." The app dispatches a virtual agent to do online research as Dustin's specific representative. That is not a bot. Not a crawler. That is closer to a CEO's executive assistant showing up at your door.

You may be surprised to learn that your site has some control over the different kinds of visitors. You could, for example, allow agents but block bots, or allow bots but block agents. Your robots.txt file, the one we talked about in an earlier post, can treat these two types of visitors differently. Most businesses are not being deliberate about this at all.

Here is the thing. A bot visiting your site is building an index. Useful, but impersonal. An agent visiting your site means a real person sent it there because they might actually want what you sell. That is a warm lead. That is someone in the middle of making a decision. Make sure you know what your website is telling the bots and the agents that stop by, and how to configure your system to welcome the traffic you do want, and ward off the traffic you don't.