Are AI assistants visiting your website?

When was the last time you checked your website’s server logs? You might be surprised to find visitors you never expected: AI assistants browsing your content.

When someone asks an AI assistant about your company, these tools are often visiting your website in real-time to grab information.

AI agents in your logs fall into two distinct categories:

Real-time retrieval agents (such as ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User) visit when users ask about your content. They appear suddenly when someone asks an AI about topics on your site, and their patterns don’t look like traditional bots.

Training data collectors (such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot) gather content for future AI models. They methodically crawl through your site similar to traditional bots.

The difference matters because real-time agents affect how your content appears in AI responses today, while training collectors affect future AI models.

Data from Cloudflare Radar reveals just how active these AI agents are across global internet traffic:

Most logs from AI agents will include a link to further documentation to understand how that agent works. However, a quick search will also reveal discussions online about the purpose and exact behavior of a specific AI agent that you might see in your logs.

Monitoring AI agents effectively

Real-time agent activity in your logs reveals something crucial: when and how often your content appears in AI conversations. In an era of “zero-click searches” where users get answers without visiting your site, these agents become a vital signal for measuring your true visibility in AI.

When ChatGPT-User appears in your logs, it means someone asked about content you own. The frequency and patterns of these visits provide insight into your AI visibility that traditional analytics can’t capture.

Set up these specific tools to understand AI traffic:

• Custom log filters - Create filters in your log analysis tool specifically for known AI user agents to isolate and study their behavior
• Traffic source segments - Build dashboard segments in Google Analytics or similar tools to track AI traffic separately from human visitors
• Page performance by agent - Track which content gets accessed most by which AI agents - this reveals what information about you is being retrieved
• Content gap analysis - Compare what AI agents access versus what humans visit to identify optimization opportunities
• Real-time alerts - Configure notifications when AI traffic spikes, which often indicates your brand is being discussed in AI conversations

While these logs won’t tell you the exact queries triggering these visits, they provide unprecedented insight into your content’s reach beyond traditional search metrics. For businesses concerned about visibility in a zero-click world, this data is invaluable.

What AI agent patterns have you noticed in your logs? Are you building specific reports to track this traffic?