AI Visibility: Traffic Monitor User Guide
The AI Traffic Monitor is a specialized analytics dashboard designed for the generative era. Traditional analytics tools often fail to distinguish between a human reader and an AI bot "learning" your content. This module provides a clear, edge-based view of how Large Language Models (LLMs) are consuming your data and which of your pages are driving the most value in AI search results.
1. The Foundation: Cloudflare Integration
To provide accurate, "zero-latency" data, the AI Traffic Monitor must be integrated with your Cloudflare account. Because AI bots often bypass standard tracking scripts, this "Edge-based" integration is the only way to intercept and log these interactions before they even reach your server.
Connection Overview
Why Cloudflare: Cloudflare handles a massive portion of global internet traffic and has built-in fingerprints for almost every known AI crawler (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, etc.).
The Setup: You will need to link your Cloudflare Zone to the AI Visibility module. This involves creating a specific API token with "Worker" permissions to allow the tool to securely read bot-specific traffic logs.
Help Resource: For a detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of the connection process, please refer to our dedicated help guide: [How to Integrate AI Visibility with Cloudflare for AI Traffic Monitoring].
2. Analyzing Traffic Trends
Once connected, the dashboard visualizes the flow of visitors to your site, categorizing them by their "User Agent" to help you understand your audience mix.
Human vs. AI Traffic
This chart provides a high-level visualization of how different types of traffic interact with your brand over time. It distinguishes between traditional search behavior and the growing influence of AI-driven discovery:
AI Traffic: This represents the volume of requests coming from AI crawlers and bots (such as GPTBot) that are actively visiting your site to fetch data for LLM training or real-time user responses.
Organic Traffic: This tracks traditional visitors who find your site through standard search engine results pages (SERPs) without an AI intermediary.
Human via AI: This specific metric identifies users who have been referred to your site directly by an AI engine (e.g., clicking a citation link within a ChatGPT or Perplexity response).
Strategic Insight: Use the Trend of Traffic chart to spot "Crawl Spikes." If you see a sudden increase in AI Bot activity, it usually means a specific page on your site has become a "top source" for a popular AI prompt.
3. The Bot Leaderboard
Not all AI engines crawl the web the same way. The Bot Leaderboard identifies which specific AI "identities" are most active on your domain.
Top Bots: See the volume of requests from specific agents like GPTBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and Google-Extended.
Understanding Intent: Training Bots: High activity here means your site is a primary source for the model's long-term knowledge.
User-Action Bots: High activity here (like ChatGPT-User) means real people are currently asking questions that are triggering the AI to visit your site in real-time.
4. Page Performance: Finding Your AI "Superstars"
This section identifies which specific pages on your website are performing best in the AI search landscape.
Metrics Tracked
Visibility Score per Page: How often this specific URL is used as a reference in AI responses.
Human Traffic Volume: The number of actual clicks driven to this page from AI citations.
Recent Ranking Trends: Whether the page is moving up or down in the AI’s "preferred source" list.
Strategic Use
Content Templates: Identify if your "How-To Guides" are getting more AI traffic than your "Product Comparisons." Use this data to double down on the formats that AI models prefer to cite.
Optimization Gaps: If a page has a high Visibility Score but low Human Traffic, you may need to make your calls-to-action (CTAs) clearer so users feel compelled to click the source link.
