The four things you’ll see
- Live read. An AI assistant’s bot fetched your page at the moment a person asked it something, so it could use the page in its answer. Bots that do this include ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User. A live read tells you your page was used to answer someone. It does not tell you whether the answer quoted you or linked to you.
- Search crawl. A bot collecting pages ahead of time for an AI search product, so the assistant can find them later. Nobody asked a question at that moment. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Applebot are examples.
- Training crawl. A bot collecting pages to train AI models. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot are examples. Your page may become part of what a model knows.
- Visitor sent by AI (Pro). A person who arrived on your site by clicking a link in an assistant’s answer. Recognised from the address they came from, such as chatgpt.com, or a tag the assistant adds to the link, such as utm_source=chatgpt.com.
How a visit is checked
Every bot announces a name, and anyone can send a false one. The plugin checks each visit two ways, depending on what the bot’s owner publishes:
- Published IP ranges. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish the addresses their bots use. A visit from outside those ranges that claims their name is marked Spoofed.
- Reverse DNS. Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta let you look up the visiting address and confirm it belongs to them.
- Bots whose owners publish nothing are marked No check. The plugin never guesses.
Putting bots and visitors together (Pro)
For each visitor, Pro looks back at what the same company’s bots did on that page:
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| After a live read | The company’s bot fetched the page in the minutes before the person arrived. The assistant read the page to answer, showed the link, and the person clicked. |
| After an earlier crawl | No live read just before, but the company had crawled the page earlier. The assistant answered from a stored copy. |
| No bot seen | No bot visit from that company on record. Either a cache hid it, the bot came before the plugin was installed, or the assistant answers from someone else’s index. |
Visitors per 100 live reads is visitors divided by live reads, times 100. It is a rough measure of how often an answer that used your page led to a click. It can go above 100 when many visitors arrive without a live read first.
What cannot be seen
- Inside an AI answer. Nothing on a web server can see whether an answer quoted you, named you or linked you. So there is no citation count, and any product that offers one is estimating.
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Clicks from them arrive with a plain google.com referrer and no distinguishing tag, exactly like Google Search. The plugin leaves them out rather than guess.
- Gemini and Copilot’s reading. They answer from Google’s and Bing’s search indexes rather than their own bot, so their page reads never show up under their own name. Their visitors are still counted.
- Grok’s browsing. Grok often fetches pages with an ordinary browser name and no referrer. What it does under its own names is recorded; the rest is invisible to every tracker.
- Bot visits a cache answered. A caching plugin or managed host serves saved pages without running WordPress. Those bot visits are missing unless you import your server log or tell the cache to let bots through. The plugin tells you when this applies to you.
Reading the numbers honestly
Live reads are an upper bound on how often a page was used in answers. Visitors are a lower bound on how often it was shown and clicked. The truth is between them, and the plugin shows both rather than inventing a number in the middle.