How to track ChatGPT traffic in WordPress
See visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude in WordPress, and how often AI crawlers read your pages – free, cookieless, no GA4 needed.
On this page
Short answer: install Omea Analytics and open Channels & campaigns. Visits that come from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and other AI assistants get their own AI Assistants channel, and the AI crawlers card counts how often bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot fetch your pages. Both run on your own server, without cookies or Google Analytics.
Set it up
- Install Omea Analytics Install and activate Omea Analytics from Plugins › Add New. Measurement starts straight away, cookieless.
- Open the Channels report Go to Omea Analytics › Dashboard. In the Channels & campaigns card, the Channels tab lists AI Assistants next to Organic Search, Direct and the rest.
- See which assistant sent the visit Click AI Assistants to filter the whole dashboard to those visits: sources (chatgpt, perplexity, gemini…), landing pages, conversions and revenue.
- Compare crawling with visits Scroll to Crawl vs referral: Crawler fetches shows how often AI crawlers read your pages, AI assistant visits how many people clicked through, per AI company.
Which AI assistants are recognised
A visit counts as AI Assistants when it arrives from one of these sites or apps, or when its utm_source names one of them:
| Assistant | Recognised as |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT (chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, Android app) | chatgpt |
| Perplexity (perplexity.ai, Android app) | perplexity |
| Gemini (gemini.google.com, AI Studio) | gemini |
| Microsoft Copilot | copilot |
| Claude (claude.ai) | claude |
| DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral Le Chat, Meta AI, Duck.ai, Kimi, Qwen, You.com, Phind, Poe | their own names |
Links ChatGPT shows in its answers often carry utm_source=chatgpt.com. Omea Analytics keeps UTM parameters (every other query value is dropped in the browser), so those visits are classified even when the browser sends no referrer.
AI answers inside Google Search (AI Overviews, AI Mode) come from google.com and count as Organic Search – Google Analytics 4 does the same.
Crawl vs referral: are AI tools reading you?
A visit only happens when a person clicks a link in an AI answer. Before that, the AI company’s crawler has to read your page. Those crawlers don’t run JavaScript – Vercel’s analysis found that none of the major ones do – so no script-based analytics tool, Google Analytics included, ever sees them.
Omea Analytics counts them on the server instead. When a page is rendered for a known AI crawler, the plugin adds one to that crawler’s count for the page – nothing else about the request is stored. It recognises GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, CCBot, meta-externalagent, Amazonbot, DuckAssistBot, cohere-ai, YouBot and MistralAI-User.
The Crawl vs referral card puts both numbers side by side per AI company. Lots of fetches and few visits means the AI reads your content but rarely links to it; no fetches at all usually means it is blocked – check your robots.txt and your CDN’s bot settings.
Counting is on by default. Turn it off under Omea Analytics › Settings › Tracking › Count AI crawlers; that setting also shows the last 30 days’ fetches per crawler.
Limits worth knowing
- Some AI clicks arrive as Direct. When an assistant opens a link without a referrer and without a UTM tag, no analytics tool can tell where the visit came from. Omea Analytics then records it as Direct, like every other tool.
- Crawler counts are a lower bound. Pages served from a page cache (a caching plugin, your host or a CDN) never reach WordPress, so those fetches aren’t counted. The dashboard says so on the card.
- Robots.txt names aren’t user agents. Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are opt-out tokens; Google and Apple fetch with their normal crawlers, so those two rows usually stay empty.
Do more with the AI Assistants segment
- Landing pages: filter to AI Assistants and look at Entry pages to see which pages AI tools send people to.
- Conversions and revenue: goals, WooCommerce orders and revenue are reported per channel, so you can see whether AI visitors buy.
- Export: every report card has a CSV export; the read-only Reporting API and WP-CLI (
wp omea-analytics sources) give the same numbers to spreadsheets and scripts.