How to figure out which AI tools are sending you the most traffic right now

Scrunch recommends tracking two complementary streams of AI-driven activity—AI agent visits and AI referrals—to see which platforms are driving traffic to your site and how it's changing over time. Together, these two data streams give a complete picture of AI influence: one measures machine activity (crawling and indexing by models such as GPT-Bot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot-AI), the other measures human behaviour triggered by AI-generated answers.

• AI agent visits show which AI models are crawling your site, how often, and for what purpose.
• AI referrals show how many humans are clicking through from AI platforms, which pages they land on, and how those visits convert.

Most AI influence is indirect. Research consistently shows that people often discover brands inside AI answers—from platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews—and then visit later via organic search or direct navigation rather than clicking an inline citation immediately. Because of this dark funnel effect, AI referral numbers alone undercount total AI-driven demand. Use AI referrals to measure direct clicks and attribute sessions to specific platforms; use agent visits as a leading indicator of crawl demand, content indexability, and live prompt activity (retrieval requests signal a model is actively answering user queries with your content).

What to measure in Scrunch

• AI agent traffic (bots)
  • See AI bot traffic over time, broken down by model (e.g., GPT-Bot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot-AI) and by request type: training, indexing, or retrieval.
  • Distinguish human vs. AI bot traffic, view top bot agents and top content pages, and inspect recent individual bot requests.
  • Retrieval requests are the highest-value signal — they indicate a model is actively fetching your content to answer a live user query.
  • Best for understanding exposure, discoverability, and live prompt activity.
• AI referral traffic (humans)
  • Track AI-sourced sessions and page views, top AI referring platforms, AI landing pages, and trend lines across your selected date range.
  • Compare conversion rates and revenue from AI vs. non-AI sources if your GA4 property tracks ecommerce events or key goal completions.
  • AI referral sessions tend to be smaller in volume than general organic traffic but frequently show higher engagement and conversion quality, reflecting high purchase-intent queries answered by AI platforms.

How to set it up

• Set up Agent Traffic
• Connect your CDN or host to Scrunch (Akamai, Cloudflare, Vercel, WordPress, and others). Follow the steps in the Agent Traffic collection.
  Learn more: Connect your CDN or provider
• Set up AI Referrals
• In the same browser session you use for Scrunch, sign in to the Google account that has access to your GA4 property.
• Open the AI Referrals tab and select the GA4 property from the dropdown.
  Learn more: Connect GA4 to AI Referrals
• If you don’t see the right property, confirm the Google account in your browser, refresh, or try an incognito window.

Where to look first

• Session Source by Breakdown (AI Referrals)
• See which AI platforms are sending the most sessions and views right now, with optional columns for Transactions and Purchase Revenue.
• AI Views Over Time and AI-Originated Views and Sessions (AI Referrals)
• Spot trend shifts by platform across your selected date range.
• Top content pages and top bot agents (Agent Traffic)
• Identify which pages AI agents hit most and which models are most active. Prioritize retrieval traffic as the closest proxy for live user intent.

Compare your brand to competitors

Scrunch’s Monitoring & Insights shows how your brand appears across AI platforms and helps you benchmark against competitors:

• Track brand presence, mentions, and citations across AI platforms.
• Measure share of voice versus competitors and how it trends over time.
• Tie visibility to outcomes by correlating presence and citations with AI referrals and conversion performance.
  Learn more: Monitoring & Insights

Supported AI platforms

Scrunch currently tracks nine major AI platforms for monitoring and analytics: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google DeepMind), Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, Grok, and Microsoft Copilot.

Details: Which AI platforms can Scrunch monitor?

Tools to use together

• Scrunch AI Referrals
• Attribute AI-originated sessions, views, and conversions via your GA4 data source.
  How-to: Track if AI search is sending traffic
• Scrunch Agent Traffic
• Monitor real-time AI bot activity by model and request type to understand exposure and intent.
  How-to: Track if AI bots are visiting your website
• Google Analytics 4
• Core analytics store for sessions, views, goals, and revenue; Scrunch layers AI-source attribution and analysis on top.
• Your CDN or hosting analytics
• Source for raw request data that powers Scrunch Agent Traffic integrations (e.g., Cloudflare, Akamai, Vercel, WordPress).

Optimize what’s working

• Prioritize citations
• Citations in AI answers drive the biggest visibility gains. Track them and close gaps.
  Guide: How to track citations in AI search
• Fix access and delivery issues
• Ensure AI agents can fetch and read your content before content changes.
  Guide: Understand the Site Audit tool
• Improve content quality
• Review the sources AI is using and outperform them with clearer, more complete pages.
• Serve AI-optimized content to agents
• Use Scrunch AXP to deliver AI-friendly page variants to visiting AI agents.
  Learn more: AXP (Agent Experience Platform)

FAQ: benchmarks to expect

There is no universal benchmark for AI bot vs. human traffic ratios — the right mix depends on your industry, site size, and content type. Focus on your own mix and trajectory using these practical guidelines:

• Prioritize retrieval requests. Among the three bot request types (training, indexing, retrieval), retrieval is the closest proxy for live user intent — it means a model is actively pulling your content to answer a real query right now.
• Expect lower but higher-quality referral volume. AI referral sessions are typically smaller in absolute number than general organic or paid traffic, but often show stronger engagement signals — longer session duration, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates — because AI answers tend to reach users further along the decision-making journey.
• Track platform-level growth, not just totals. Monitor how referral volume and agent visits grow (or decline) for each individual platform — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, etc. — and correlate those trends with your citation share, share of voice, and downstream conversion performance to identify which platforms are most commercially valuable for your brand.

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• What benchmarks or baselines are useful when evaluating AI search performance?Scrunch recommends tracking brand presence, citations, referral traffic, AI agent traffic, and share of voice versus competitors as key performance indicators.
• How can I see if my visibility in AI search is improving or declining over time?Scrunch recommends monitoring AI search trend data like brand mentions and citations consistently over 2-3 week periods to identify real trends versus one-off changes.
• How many prompts should I track for AI search?Scrunch recommends estimating how many prompts to track for AI search using the following approach: X [# of topic clusters] x Y [12-15 questions related to each topic cluster] = Z [# of AI search prompts to track]. The primary goal is to get a representative sampling of data across all customer journey stages via a mix of branded and non-branded prompts.
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