People can visit your website through AI assistants. However, AI systems can also retrieve content or perform tasks on your website on their own. Friendly Analytics therefore distinguishes between three types of AI traffic. Here, you’ll learn where to find the relevant reports and for which types of traffic you need to set up additional tracking.

1. Acquisition from AI

This report shows human visitors who arrive at your website from an AI assistant. For example, a person receives a recommendation in ChatGPT or Meta AI and clicks on a link to your website from there.

These visits are tracked using your existing JavaScript tracking. Friendly Analytics can associate them with an AI assistant if the relevant referral information is included with the visit.

Open “Acquisition → AI Assistants” to analyze these visits.

image.png

<aside> ℹ️

Good to know: This report shows referred human visits. You can find direct visits from AI chatbots and AI agents in the following reports.

</aside>

2. Direct Access by AI Chatbots

AI chatbots can directly retrieve content from your website to answer questions or compile information. They generally do not execute JavaScript. Therefore, your existing tracking script does not record these requests.

For these requests, you'll need a server-side integration: It identifies supported AI chatbots based on their requests to your website and reports the requests to Friendly Analytics. The BotTracking plugin required for this is already included in Friendly Analytics. You'll need to set up the integration for your website.

Set Up AI Chatbot Tracking

  1. Open “AI Assistants → AI Chatbots Overview.”
  2. Click “Set up AI Chatbot tracking now” in the yellow notice at the top.
  3. Follow the instructions provided to set up the appropriate server-side integration for your website.

SCR-20261005-pvfc.png

For more information on setting this up, see the Matomo documentation on the AI Chatbots Overview Report.

Once the integration is set up and supported AI chatbots access your content, their requests will appear in the “AI Chatbots Overview.” There, you can see how often chatbots request content and which pages they access.

<aside> ℹ️

Important: This report tracks detected AI chatbots that retrieve content for their responses. It is not a complete overview of all crawlers. According to the Matomo documentation, crawlers that collect content for indexing or for training AI models are excluded from these AI reports.

</aside>

3. Visits by AI Agents

AI agents can independently perform tasks on a website on behalf of a person, such as booking a ticket or filling out a form.