How It Works

Yes, but on evidence instead of a hunch. citAEOtion shows you exactly which bots hit which pages and how often, so you can decide per bot: keep the training and assistant crawlers that get you cited, and throttle or block the scrapers that just burn bandwidth. Blocking blind is the real danger - cut off a training or assistant crawler and you can quietly remove yourself from the answers that engine builds. citAEOtion gives you the per-bot data to make that call precisely.

citAEOtion installs as a WordPress plugin in about five minutes - activate it, connect your site, and it starts recording AI crawler activity immediately. No code, no wrangling raw log files, no tag manager. It is built for WordPress, which is exactly why the install is a five-minute job instead of a server-configuration project.

No. citAEOtion records crawler requests at the server level and writes them to its own table - it does not add front-end JavaScript, render-blocking scripts, or any page weight for your human visitors. The logging runs out of the visitor's path, so your Core Web Vitals and load times are unaffected. You get the full crawler record without paying for it in speed.

Yes. citAEOtion runs on your WordPress site and records the AI crawlers that reach it, whether or not you use Cloudflare. One thing worth knowing if you run an aggressive edge cache: requests served entirely from the CDN edge may not reach your origin, so for the most complete crawler picture you want the bots reaching the server citAEOtion reads. For the vast majority of WordPress sites it is fully compatible and captures what hits your site.

Prompt-based tools pick a list of questions, ask ChatGPT or Perplexity, and report whether your brand showed up. You chose the prompt, language models are non-deterministic so the same question can return a different answer an hour later, and none of it proves a crawler ever touched your page. citAEOtion reads your real server traffic instead - the actual requests AI bots made, by bot, by page, by day. One is a guess you can repeat and get a different result; the other is what actually happened. That is the whole thesis: the GA for AI. Full data. No BS.

citAEOtion tracks every major AI crawler and sorts each into one of four categories so the count means something. AI Training bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Meta-ExternalAgent pull your content into model training. AI Search bots index you to answer searches inside AI engines. AI Assistant bots like PerplexityBot and ChatGPT-User fetch you live to answer a user's question right now. Data Scraper covers everything else taking your content. The classifier stays current as new bots appear, so you are never guessing what a user-agent means.

citAEOtion works at the server level, not in the browser. Tools like Google Analytics run JavaScript in the visitor's browser, but AI crawlers fetch your raw HTML and never run JavaScript - Vercel found no JavaScript execution across more than a billion AI crawler requests - so browser analytics never see them. citAEOtion reads your server's record of every request: the bot's user-agent, the exact page, the timestamp, and the response code. That captures every crawler at the network level, including the ones a tracking pixel would miss entirely.

AI crawler tracking is reading your server's own record of which AI bots requested your pages - GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and the rest - so you can see who is reading your site, how often, and what they take. It is the opposite of prompt-based "AI visibility" tools that ask a chatbot whether it mentions you and hand back a guess. Crawler tracking is the ground truth: an objective, timestamped record of what actually happened, by bot, by page, by day. citAEOtion reads that record and classifies every crawler so the numbers mean something instead of being a vanity score.