Understand AI visitors and crawlers
AI traffic can refer to several different things. Keeping them separate helps you understand what your evidence actually shows.
2 min readPlain-language reference
Three different signals
| Signal | What it tells you | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Crawler request | Software requested a page. | That your page was indexed, recommended, or displayed in an answer. |
| Human AI referral | A recorded visit had an identifiable AI service as its source. | Every mention of your website or the exact question someone asked. |
| Associated payment | A recorded payment was matched and credited under a reporting rule. | That an AI referral alone caused the purchase. |
Where crawler requests come from
Crawlers do not run the Attriboo script. Crawler requests are recorded only after you set up the WordPress plugin or a Cloudflare Worker, as described in Track AI crawlers. Without either, the crawler count stays at zero even when AI services read your pages.
Look at human referrals
- Choose one website and period.
- Find Sources in the dashboard.
- Look for named sources such as ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Compare visitors and credited revenue within that same report.
Do not turn separate counts into a journey
Imagine 500 crawler requests and 40 human visits in the same period. That does not establish that 8% of crawler requests became visits. The requests and visits have not necessarily been matched to the same people or answers. This example is fictional.
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