We analyzed scan data AIDE collected from 12,384 Turkish sites in Q1 2026. The findings show that the AI bot ecosystem is expanding rapidly in Turkey while site owners' policies are lagging far behind.
Top numbers
- AI bot traffic grew 287% year-over-year.
- Only 23% of the 12,384 sites have written specific rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot.
- 41% of e-commerce sites left the Schema.org
Product+Offerchain incomplete (onlyProduct). - Sites with
llms.txtreached 4% — up from 0.6% the previous year.
Most active families
| Bot family | Traffic share | YoY growth | | --- | --- | --- | | ClaudeBot | 32% | +420% | | GPTBot | 28% | +180% | | PerplexityBot | 19% | +510% | | Google-Extended | 12% | +65% | | Other (CCBot, Bytespider, …) | 9% | +140% |
PerplexityBot's growth stands out; the Comet browser's active user base climbed visibly within the Turkish tech ecosystem in 2026.
Sector breakdown
E-commerce > media > SaaS, in that order, see the heaviest AI agent traffic. Banking and government sites lag in absolute volume but grow fastest.
Impact of robots.txt policies
A noteworthy finding: sites that wrote specific Allow rules for AI agents in robots.txt saw on average 3.2x more appearances in agent citations. The reason: agents flag sites with ambiguous policies as "risky" and exclude them from source lists.
Recommendations
- Add specific rules for AI bot families to
robots.txt. - Publish an
llms.txtfile (30-min job). - Complete your JSON-LD
Product+Offer,Article, andFAQPageblocks. - Make sure your sitemap is up-to-date.
Further reading
Pro account holders can pull the raw dataset via API: GET /v1/research/q1-2026.
