What's the difference between Bot Visits and Human Visits in AI Crawlers?
Bot visits count AI crawlers fetching your pages, split by purpose; Human visits count real people who arrived from an AI answer.
AI crawlers splits the traffic AI engines send your way into two separate signals: Bot visits and Human visits. This article explains what each one measures, how WriteWorks collects them, and how to read them together to understand how answer engines discover your site and send people to it.
Bot visits count every request an AI engine's crawler makes to a page on your site. WriteWorks recognises the named AI crawlers by their user agent and groups each fetch by purpose. AI Citation covers live fetches made because a person asked an assistant something, such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User. AI Indexing covers crawlers that build the search indexes AI answers are drawn from, such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. AI Training covers crawlers that collect text for model training, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot. AI Assistant covers agents that browse on a user's behalf. Citation and indexing fetches are the ones that lead to you appearing in answers; training fetches only affect what future models know.
Human visits count real people who clicked through to your site from an AI answer, grouped by the referring engine. The Human visits view shows AI-referred visits over time and % Traffic from AI, the share of tracked visits that came from AI engines rather than from crawlers. Read together, the two signals show the funnel: crawler interest first, then real visitors.
Both signals come from your own traffic, so they need tracking switched on. Connect your host under the Settings view of AI crawlers. Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai and WordPress can be connected in a few clicks, and any other server can use a short Next.js, Express or Nginx snippet. An optional browser snippet is also available. Until the first event arrives, AI crawlers shows the setup card instead of empty charts. AI crawlers is included on the Growth and Enterprise plans.
How to use these metrics
- Open AI crawlers from the Measure section of the sidebar.
- If you see the setup card, connect your host first.
- Open the Bot visits view to see which engines crawl you and for what purpose.
- Open the Human visits view to see AI-referred visits by engine.
- Use the period bar (7d to 12m, or Custom) to compare against the previous period.
- A jump in citation or indexing fetches without matching human visits can mean engines are still evaluating your content.
- Use the Pages view to see which URLs crawlers fetch most and which they never reach.
Tip: watch both numbers together. Bot interest is the leading indicator, and human visits confirm it is reaching a real audience.
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