How do I track which AI platforms are sending traffic to my website?
How to see which AI platforms send traffic to your website: GA4 referral setup, the difference from bot hits, and tools that attribute AI visits to conversions.
To track which AI platforms send traffic to your website, you need two separate measurements that people constantly confuse. One is referral traffic: humans who clicked a link in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Copilot and landed on your site. The other is crawler traffic: bots from those companies fetching your pages. The first tells you what AI search delivers. The second tells you whether AI search can read you. Both matter, and neither substitutes for the other.
Method 1: GA4 and referrer rules
GA4 is the free starting point. Open your traffic acquisition report by session source, then look for sources from AI platforms. Group them with a custom channel group or an exploration filter using a regex on source, covering the engines you care about, so AI visits stop hiding inside "referral" or "direct".
It works, with caveats worth knowing:
- Some AI visits arrive without a referrer and fall into direct traffic, so GA4 undercounts.
- Referrer strings change over time, so the regex needs periodic checking against your real data.
- GA4 shows sessions and conversions, but not which prompt, citation or page caused the visit.
- It says nothing about bots.
For a small site or a first look, this is enough. Build the segment, save it and review it monthly.
Method 2: server and CDN logs
Your CDN or server logs record every request, including AI crawler hits. Cloudflare publishes documentation on AI bot analytics, and other CDNs offer similar log access. Logs show which bots fetched which pages and how often, with errors. They do not show visitors clicking from an answer. Use them to confirm access, not to count traffic.
The bots to look for by their real names: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Agent and GoogleOther. There is no bot called "ChatGPTBot", so a filter built on that name finds nothing. Also remember that user agents can be spoofed, so a log line that claims to be GPTBot is not proof.
Method 3: a platform that does both and joins them
Doing the first two by hand means two data sources, two sets of rules and no link between a crawl, a citation and a visit. A purpose-built platform closes that gap.
Promptwatch covers both halves. Its visitor analytics tracks AI-referred traffic and conversions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, Kimi, Mistral and more, installed with a lightweight script, a Google Tag Manager template or the WordPress plugin. Agent Analytics records IP-verified AI crawler logs, so spoofed user agents are filtered out, and it ships a crawl-to-citation path with a citation rate per page. Its 360 Insights view joins crawler logs, citation clicks and AI-referred visits per page, so you can see which pages are fetched, cited and actually visited. Crawler logs can be fed from Cloudflare (Logpush or an auto-deployed Worker), AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, custom HTTP or the WordPress plugin.
Visitor analytics is available on paid plans, with 200K visitor events on Essential ($95 a month), 1M on Professional ($245) and 10M on Business ($579). Crawler logs start on Professional.
How the options compare
| Option | AI referral visits | Conversions | Crawler logs | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GA4 with channel rules | Partial; visits with no referrer are missed | Yes | No | Free |
| Promptwatch | Yes, by engine | Yes | Yes (Professional and up) | Free tier; paid from $95/mo |
| AthenaHQ | GA4, Shopify and Webflow revenue attribution | Via integrations | No published product | From $295/mo |
| Scrunch AI | Bot and agent traffic reporting | Not the focus | Bot reporting on Core | From $250/mo |
| Siftly | Traffic, leads and revenue from AI search | Yes | Not published | Not published |
| Attrifast | AI sessions joined to Stripe and Shopify | Revenue | No | From $9.99/mo |
AthenaHQ lists GA4, Shopify and Webflow revenue attribution in its feature set, though the catalog notes it has no crawler analytics. Scrunch AI reports AI agent and bot traffic on its $250 Core plan, which is crawler-side more than visitor-side. Siftly reports traffic, leads and revenue from AI search but covers four engines and does not publish plan pricing. Attrifast is a narrow, cheap revenue-attribution tool that joins AI-referred sessions to Stripe and Shopify. Passionfruit places AI-channel revenue next to page-level citation tracking from $19 a month.
Who should pick which
Stay on GA4 if you have little traffic and just need a first read. Accept the undercount.
Choose Promptwatch if you want to know which engines send visitors, which pages they cite, and whether the bots can fetch those pages, all in one place. The deciding factor is usually the join between crawl, citation and visit, which a separate analytics tool cannot give you.
Choose Attrifast or Passionfruit if your question is narrowly about revenue and you already monitor visibility elsewhere.
Choose AthenaHQ or Scrunch if you are buying them for optimization or crawler-side serving and want some traffic reporting on the side.
A practical setup in an afternoon
- Create the GA4 AI channel group as a baseline.
- Install a visitor analytics script that tags AI referrals and conversions.
- Connect CDN or server logs so crawler hits are recorded with IP verification.
- Compare the three views monthly. If bots fetch a page but nobody visits, the page may not be getting cited. If a page is cited but never visited, look at how it appears in the answer.
Do not read causation into small numbers. A handful of sessions can swing the percentages, so report counts next to ratios and trend over weeks and months rather than days.