Guide
How to detect ChatGPT traffic on your website
There are two distinct signals to track — crawler traffic and visitor referral traffic. This guide explains how each is measured and where it lands in the dashboard.
Signal 1
Crawler traffic — GPTBot + OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI's two main crawlers. GPTBot is the general-purpose indexer; OAI-SearchBot is the real-time search-result fetcher.
- Where it lands: The Bot Intelligence view, under AI crawlers.
- What you see: Per-day frequency, per-page hit count, last-seen timestamp.
- What it means: Your content is being read by an AI surface — but a crawl does NOT mean you appear in AI answers. See signal 2 below.
Signal 2
Visitor referral traffic — humans clicking ChatGPT citations
When a ChatGPT user clicks a citation link, they arrive at your site with chat.openai.com or chatgpt.com in the Referer header. This is the signal that says ChatGPT actually surfaced your content to a real user.
- Where it lands: The AI Referrals view, under ChatGPT.
- What you see: Per-page referral count + which AI source attributed it.
- Caveat: When ChatGPT strips the referrer, the visit lands in direct traffic. We don't invent the attribution; what you see is what we measured.
Reading the two together
High crawl frequency + zero referrals
A common pattern. GPTBot is fetching your pages, but no humans are arriving from ChatGPT. Three honest reasons:
- ChatGPT may be reading you for training without surfacing you in answers yet.
- ChatGPT users may not be clicking through (citations get viewed, not always followed).
- The referrer is being stripped on navigation.
FAQ
Frequently asked
- What does 'ChatGPT traffic' actually mean?
- Two distinct things: (1) crawler traffic — GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot fetching your pages; (2) visitor referral traffic — a human clicking a link in ChatGPT and landing on your page with a chat.openai.com or chatgpt.com referrer. They are measured on different surfaces.
- Why does ChatGPT sometimes strip the referrer?
- Privacy-preserving navigation. When the referrer is stripped, the visit cannot be attributed to ChatGPT and lands in 'direct' traffic. We never guess. If the Referer is empty, the event is honest about it.
- Can I see WHICH page in ChatGPT linked to me?
- No. ChatGPT does not pass the source-conversation context in the referer. We see only the hostname. That is by design on ChatGPT's side; no analytics tool can recover what they intentionally do not send.