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AI Referrals

AI referrals are real human visitors who clicked a link in an AI chatbot response (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity) and landed on your website. While AI crawler tracking tells you which bots are indexing your content, AI referrals tell you something more directly valuable: whether your AI visibility is actually driving traffic to your site.

How it works

Cleotic detects AI referrals automatically using the same Vercel log drain you've already set up for crawler tracking. No additional setup is needed.

For each request that hits your site, Cleotic inspects:

  • The HTTP Referer header -- when a user clicks a link inside an AI chat, their browser typically includes the AI assistant's domain (e.g., https://chatgpt.com/) as the referrer.
  • The utm_source query parameter -- some AI tools tag outbound links with ?utm_source=chatgpt.com instead of (or in addition to) sending a referrer header.

If either matches a known AI chatbot, the visit is recorded as an AI referral.

Detected AI sources

Cleotic currently detects referrals from:

  • ChatGPT (OpenAI) -- chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com
  • Claude (Anthropic) -- claude.ai
  • Perplexity -- perplexity.ai
  • Gemini (Google) -- gemini.google.com, bard.google.com
  • Copilot (Microsoft) -- copilot.microsoft.com, bing.com/chat
  • Meta AI -- meta.ai
  • You.com -- you.com
  • Le Chat (Mistral) -- chat.mistral.ai
  • Grok (xAI) -- grok.com, x.com/i/grok
  • Character.AI -- character.ai
  • DuckDuckGo AI -- duckduckgo.com/aichat

What you'll see

The AI Traffic tab in your project has two views, with AI Referrals as the default. The view shows:

Stats cards

  • Total AI Referrals -- the count of human visitors arriving from AI chatbots in the last 30 days
  • Unique Landing Pages -- how many distinct pages received at least one AI referral
  • AI Sources -- how many different AI assistants sent traffic your way

AI Referrals Over Time

A daily chart showing referral volume broken down by AI source. Use the Provider / Source toggle to switch between provider-level grouping (e.g., all OpenAI traffic combined) and source-level grouping (e.g., separate ChatGPT vs. ChatGPT-User).

Referrals by Source / Provider

A horizontal bar chart showing total referrals per AI assistant. Sort lets you see at a glance which AI tools are driving the most traffic.

Top Landing Pages

A table of the pages that received the most AI referrals, with the AI sources that referred users. Use the dropdown filter to narrow the table to a specific provider or source -- the visit counts and ranking adjust accordingly.

Why it matters

Crawler activity is a leading indicator -- it tells you AI systems can see your content. AI referrals are a lagging indicator -- they tell you AI systems are actively recommending you to real users.

Use this data to:

  • Validate your AI visibility strategy. If your visibility scores are climbing but referrals stay flat, AI tools may know about you without recommending you.
  • Identify your strongest AI evangelists. Knowing which AI assistants drive the most traffic helps you focus optimisation efforts.
  • Find your highest-performing landing pages. Pages that win AI referrals are already doing something right -- consider creating more in the same vein.
  • Measure campaign impact. Launched a new product page or content piece? Watch referrals to see if AI tools start surfacing it.

Notes and limitations

  • Some AI assistants strip referrer headers for privacy. We catch what we can.
  • We exclude self-referrals (e.g., a user clicking from one of your own pages to another) so the numbers reflect external AI traffic only.
  • This feature requires the Vercel log drain to be configured. If you set up tracking before this feature was released, no action is needed -- referrals will start being captured automatically.

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