AI agent statistics for 2026

Key AI agent statistics

• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity made 5,335 requests to one business website in 14 days, against 2,689 from Google's crawlers.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 39 percent of crawl requests from GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot asked for a Markdown copy of a page, against 1 percent of Googlebot's.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot fetched llms.txt 0 times in 14 days.
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found 60,115 MCP servers in the official MCP Registry on November 10, 2026.⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 67 percent of the MCP servers in the official registry can be reached at a web address, with nothing to install.⁶
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that the median AI answering service costs $0.99 a call and the median live service $4.20 a call, at 150 calls a month.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that a full-time receptionist on staff costs about 30 times the median AI receptionist's bill for 150 calls a month.⁸
• The Conecto Agent Price List shows that 54 percent of the 582 tools an AI agent can call on Conecto cost nothing, and the median paid call costs $0.01.¹¹

AI crawler statistics: what AI bots read on a website

The Conecto AI Crawler Log covers every request that a named search or AI crawler made to conecto.chat from October 27 to November 9, 2026. The site opened to the public on October 27, so these are the first 14 days of a new business website.

• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 2,063 requests from OpenAI's three agents in 14 days: 1,220 from GPTBot, 722 from OAI-SearchBot and 121 from ChatGPT-User.¹
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 1,665 requests from Anthropic's three agents in 14 days: 1,599 from ClaudeBot, 62 from Claude-User and 4 from Claude-SearchBot.²
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 1,607 requests from PerplexityBot in 14 days.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 2,689 requests from Google in 14 days: 1,555 from Googlebot and 1,134 from GoogleOther.³
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity together sent 3.4 requests for every request from Googlebot.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 745 requests from Bingbot in 14 days, about one seventh of what OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity sent.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that Bytespider, ByteDance's crawler, made more requests than any other crawler: 6,807 in 14 days, 65 percent of them for images, scripts and styles.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 2,411 requests from Amazonbot, 1,714 from Applebot, 499 from Meta's crawler and 462 from Common Crawl's CCBot in 14 days.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot, Amazonbot and Googlebot each visited on all 14 days.

AI crawlers ask for Markdown, and search crawlers don't

Every page of conecto.chat has a Markdown copy at its own address with .md added, and each page names that copy in a link. AI crawlers follow it. Search crawlers almost never do.

• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 48 percent of GPTBot's requests asked for a Markdown copy of a page (591 of 1,220).
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 44 percent of ClaudeBot's requests asked for a Markdown copy of a page (707 of 1,599).
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 32 percent of PerplexityBot's requests asked for a Markdown copy of a page (510 of 1,607).
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 1 percent of Googlebot's requests asked for a Markdown copy of a page (17 of 1,555), and 0.3 percent of Bingbot's (2 of 745).
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that the four crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity asked for Markdown in 2,000 of their 5,148 requests, or 39 percent.

Do AI crawlers read llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed file that tells AI agents what a website holds. Its author says thousands of sites publish one.⁴ In our logs, the large AI crawlers did not ask for it.

• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot fetched llms.txt 0 times in 14 days.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot fetched robots.txt 194 times in the same 14 days.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 145 requests for llms.txt from all clients in 14 days: 53 from browsers, 24 from curl, and most of the rest from directory checkers and site audit tools.

How often ChatGPT and Claude open a website for a user

ChatGPT-User and Claude-User are not crawlers. OpenAI says ChatGPT may visit a page with the ChatGPT-User agent when a user asks a question, and Anthropic says the same of Claude-User.^1,2 Each request is a person's conversation reading the site at that moment.

• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 183 page fetches made for users of ChatGPT and Claude in 14 days, about 13 a day: 121 by ChatGPT-User and 62 by Claude-User.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that ChatGPT-User came on all 14 days and Claude-User on 13 of them.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 47 percent of ChatGPT-User's fetches went to the home page (57 of 121).

How many fake crawlers there are

A request can claim any name. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Apple and DuckDuckGo publish the IP ranges their crawlers use, so a claim can be checked.^{1,3,13,14,15,16}

• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 37 percent of requests claiming to be Googlebot came from outside Google's published ranges (927 of 2,482).
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 701 of the 927 fake Googlebot requests came from one network, and the other 226 from 29 addresses.
• The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that all 6 requests claiming to be Perplexity-User came from outside Perplexity's published ranges, and each asked for a file such as /.env.production or /railway.json.

How many MCP servers are there?

The MCP Registry is the official list of publicly accessible MCP servers, backed by Anthropic, GitHub, PulseMCP and Microsoft, and it is in preview.⁵ It lists servers whose makers published them there, so the count is a floor: many MCP servers are in no registry.

• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found 60,115 MCP servers in the official MCP Registry on November 10, 2026.⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 67 percent of the servers in the official MCP Registry are remote: 40,562 list a web address an agent connects to, with nothing to install.⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 39 percent of the servers in the official MCP Registry list a package to install and run (23,428), and 4,540 servers offer both ways.⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 68 percent of packaged MCP servers are on npm (16,009), 21 percent on PyPI (5,031) and 7 percent are container images (1,717).⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 98 percent of remote MCP servers use streamable HTTP, and 1,100 still offer the older SSE transport.⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 57 percent of the servers in the official MCP Registry are published under a GitHub account's name (34,066 of 60,115).⁶
• The Conecto MCP Registry Count found that 53 percent of the servers in the official MCP Registry published their latest version on or after October 1, 2026 (31,853 of 60,115).⁶

What AI agents cost per action

Conecto sells business tools that an AI agent calls and pays for one action at a time. Its price list is public, so it shows what an agent's work costs when there is no subscription.

• The Conecto Agent Price List shows 582 tools in 52 areas as of November 10, 2026, and 314 of them, 54 percent, cost nothing to call.¹¹
• The Conecto Agent Price List shows that the median price of a paid tool call is $0.01, and 82 percent of paid calls cost one cent or less.¹¹
• The Conecto Agent Price List shows that a small business's month of CRM, help desk, scheduling, e-signature and accounting work costs $25.10 in agent calls, against $98 for five subscriptions at list price.¹²
• The Conecto Agent Price List shows that a phone call answered by an AI agent costs $0.25 per started minute, and a phone number $2.00 to $25.00 a month.¹¹

AI receptionist and answering service cost statistics

The Conecto Answering Service Price Index bills 18 services for the same month of calls, each call lasting two and a half minutes. Conecto's own service is left out of every range and median.

• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that for 150 calls a month, live answering services charge $309 to $1,725, with a median of $630.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that for 150 calls a month, AI answering services charge $79 to $270, with a median of $149.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that a call answered by a person costs 4.2 times as much as a call answered by an AI: $4.20 against $0.99 at the median.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that the gap grows with volume: at 400 calls a month the median live bill is $1,499 and the median AI bill $235, more than six times apart.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that the median AI receptionist costs $75 a month for 50 calls, $112 for 100, $149 for 150 and $199 for 300.⁸
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that the median AI receptionist's price per call falls from $1.50 at 50 calls a month to $0.59 at 400.⁸
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that 3 of 7 AI receptionists cost under $100 a month at 100 calls.⁸
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that for the same 150 calls, the most expensive live service charges 5.6 times as much as the cheapest, and the most expensive AI service 3.4 times as much.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that 3 of 21 answering services publish no prices at all.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that billing a call of 2 minutes 30 seconds as 3 whole minutes adds 20 percent to the bill.⁷

Virtual receptionist cost statistics

The Conecto Virtual Receptionist Price Check bills six services that sell live receptionists for the same answered minutes.

• The 2026 Conecto Virtual Receptionist Price Check found that 100 answered minutes a month cost $159 to $415 across six services, with a median of $272.¹⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Virtual Receptionist Price Check found that the median price of a live virtual receptionist falls from $2.94 a minute on a 50-minute month to $2.36 a minute on a 500-minute month.¹⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Virtual Receptionist Price Check found that the same 200 minutes cost $1.35 a minute at the cheapest service and $4.05 at the most expensive, three times as much.¹⁷

What a receptionist on staff costs

• The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median receptionist earned $18.27 an hour in May 2025, or $38,010 a year.⁹
• The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that wages make up 70 percent of what a private employer pays for a worker, as of June 2026.¹⁰
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index puts a full-time receptionist on staff at about $54,300 a year, or $4,525 a month, from those two figures.⁷
• The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that a receptionist on staff costs about 7 times the median live answering bill and about 30 times the median AI bill for 150 calls a month.⁷

How we measured

Conecto AI Crawler Log

We read the web server's request logs for conecto.chat from October 27 to November 9, 2026, in UTC, and kept every request whose user agent named a search or AI crawler: 22,051 requests. For crawlers whose operators publish IP ranges (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Apple and DuckDuckGo) we counted only requests from inside those ranges, as published on November 10, 2026, which left 21,053.^1,3 The other crawlers are counted by the name they sent. A request "asked for Markdown" when its address ended in .md.

Two things about the site shape these numbers. Its robots.txt welcomes every crawler, AI crawlers included. And every page links to its Markdown copy, so a crawler that follows links finds it. The log covers one website in its first two weeks, so it shows what these crawlers did here. Other sites will differ.

Conecto MCP Registry Count

We read every entry of the official MCP Registry through its public API on November 10, 2026, and counted each server name once, at its latest version, leaving out versions marked deprecated or deleted.⁶ A server counts as remote when its entry lists a web address to connect to, and as a package when it lists a package to install and run.

Conecto Answering Service Price Index

We read 21 services' pricing pages on November 5, 2026, in US dollars at monthly prices, and worked out the cheapest bill each service's own plans would send for 50, 150 and 400 calls of two and a half minutes. Setup fees, add-ons and yearly discounts are left out. The full tables and rules are in what an answering service costs and what an AI receptionist costs.

Conecto Virtual Receptionist Price Check

We read six services' pricing pages on November 10, 2026, and took the cheapest bill each one's plans and extra-minute rates would send for 50, 100, 200 and 500 answered minutes, counting a call as two and a half minutes for the one service that sells calls. The tables are in what a virtual receptionist costs.

Conecto Agent Price List

The counts and prices come from Conecto's own tool catalog of November 10, 2026, the same snapshot that draws every tool page. The sample month and the five subscriptions it is compared with are set out, with each subscription's source, on What is Conecto?.

How to cite these statistics

You may quote any number on this page. Please name the study and link to this page, so readers can check the method. For example:

"The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 48 percent of GPTBot's requests asked for a Markdown copy of a page (conecto.chat/statistics)."

The same numbers are available as JSON and as Markdown. We update this page when we measure again, and the address stays the same. To ask about the data or report a mistake, write to hello@conecto.chat.

Questions

How many MCP servers are there in 2026?

The Conecto MCP Registry Count found 60,115 MCP servers in the official MCP Registry on November 10, 2026. Of those, 67 percent are remote servers at a web address and 39 percent are packages to install. The registry lists only servers their makers published there, so the number of MCP servers in use is higher.

Do AI crawlers read llms.txt?

Not in our logs. The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot fetched llms.txt 0 times in 14 days on conecto.chat, while three of them fetched robots.txt 194 times. The 145 requests for llms.txt came from browsers, curl, directory checkers and audit tools.

Do AI crawlers read Markdown?

Yes, when a site offers it. The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log found that 48 percent of GPTBot's requests, 44 percent of ClaudeBot's and 32 percent of PerplexityBot's asked for the Markdown copy of a page, against 1 percent of Googlebot's.

How often do AI crawlers visit a website compared with Google?

On conecto.chat, more often. The 2026 Conecto AI Crawler Log counted 5,335 requests from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity in 14 days and 2,689 from Googlebot and GoogleOther.

How much does an AI receptionist cost?

The 2026 Conecto Answering Service Price Index found that the median AI receptionist costs $149 a month for 150 calls, or $0.99 a call, with bills from $79 to $270. The median live answering service costs $630 for the same calls.

How much do AI agents cost?

It depends on what the agent does. On Conecto, where an agent pays per action, the median paid tool call costs $0.01 and 54 percent of tools cost nothing. A month of CRM, help desk, scheduling, e-signature and accounting work comes to $25.10. The agent's own subscription, such as Claude or ChatGPT, comes on top.

Sources

Numbers Conecto measured link to the page that explains the method. Facts about other organizations come from their own pages, read on the date given.

1. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, OpenAI, read November 10, 2026
2. Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, Claude Help Center, read November 10, 2026
3. Googlebot IP ranges, Google Search Central, read November 10, 2026
4. The /llms.txt file, v2, llmstxt.org, read November 10, 2026
5. The MCP Registry, Model Context Protocol, read November 10, 2026
6. MCP Registry API, list of servers, counted November 10, 2026
7. What an answering service costs, Conecto, prices read November 5, 2026
8. What an AI receptionist costs, Conecto, prices read November 5, 2026
9. Receptionists, Occupational Outlook Handbook, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, read November 5, 2026
10. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, read November 5, 2026
11. Every Conecto tool and its price, Conecto, catalog of November 9, 2026
12. What is Conecto, with the sample month and each subscription's price, Conecto
13. Bingbot IP ranges, Microsoft Bing, read November 10, 2026
14. PerplexityBot IP ranges, Perplexity, read November 10, 2026
15. Applebot IP ranges, Apple, read November 10, 2026
16. DuckDuckBot IP ranges, DuckDuckGo, read November 10, 2026
17. What a virtual receptionist costs, Conecto, prices read November 10, 2026

Conecto publishes this page and sells business tools for AI agents. How we write our guides. To report a mistake, write to hello@conecto.chat.