Content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of servers around the world that keeps copies of your site close to visitors, so pages load faster and the site stays up.
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a network of servers spread around the world that stores copies of your website's files and serves them from whichever server is closest to the visitor. Someone in Sydney gets your page from a server in Australia, not from your host in Frankfurt.
Marketers rarely set one up themselves, but it touches things they care about: how fast pages load, whether the site holds up when a campaign goes viral, and which bots get let in.
What a CDN does
The main job is speed. Files that don't change often, like images, scripts and style sheets, are kept on servers near your visitors, so they arrive faster. Many CDNs also cache whole pages, shield your site from attacks and floods of traffic, and let you set rules about who may visit.
Common CDNs include Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai and Amazon CloudFront. Many hosting platforms include one by default.
Why it matters for AI bots
A CDN sits in front of your site, so it sees every visit first, bots included. That makes it a powerful place to block or allow AI crawlers. Some CDNs have settings that manage AI bots in one place, such as Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control.
That can be what you want. But a rule set at the CDN doesn't show in your robots.txt, so it's easy to block a search bot by accident and never notice. If an AI platform's search bot can't reach your pages, that platform can't read them when it answers.
For example, Harrow & Pine turns on a bot protection setting in its CDN to stop scrapers. Its robots.txt still allows every AI bot, but a month later its product pages have stopped appearing in ChatGPT answers. The CDN was turning away the platform's search bot.
In AnswerOrbit
Connect your server logs from your CDN or host, such as Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai or Fastly, and the Bot visits tab shows which AI bots reached your site and which requests failed. See Website and AI traffic.