Revenue Attribution
AI Referrals & Bot Crawls
How Reaudit detects AI platform referrals and AI bot crawls on your site.
Two of the most important metrics in Attribution are AI Referrals and Bot Crawls. Together, they tell you how much AI-driven activity is happening on your site.
AI Referrals
An AI Referral is when a real person clicks a link in an AI platform's response and lands on your website. For example, if someone asks Perplexity a question, Perplexity cites your article, and the user clicks the citation link — that's an AI referral.
Reaudit detects AI referrals from:
- Perplexity AI — perplexity.ai referrer
- ChatGPT — chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com referrer
- Gemini — gemini.google.com referrer
- Claude — claude.ai referrer
- Copilot — copilot.microsoft.com referrer
- You.com — you.com referrer
- Other AI search engines — Any recognized AI platform referrer
Bot Crawls
A bot crawl is when an AI company's crawler visits your website to index your content for its AI model. These are not real visitors — they are automated bots. But they are important because content that gets crawled is more likely to be cited in AI responses.
Known AI bots tracked:
- GPTBot — OpenAI's web crawler
- ClaudeBot — Anthropic's web crawler
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity's web crawler
- Bingbot (AI) — Microsoft/Bing AI crawler
- GoogleOther — Google's AI training crawler
- Bytespider — TikTok/ByteDance's crawler
- Meta-ExternalAgent — Meta's AI crawler
Why Bot Crawls Matter
If AI bots are not crawling your site, your content cannot appear in AI responses. Monitor bot crawls to ensure your site is being indexed. If crawls drop, check your robots.txt and make sure you're not blocking AI bots.