How to Track Bot & AI Crawler Traffic with UseClick
See exactly which AI assistants, search engines, and training crawlers are hitting your links — separated from real human clicks.
Guide
Every link you share gets clicked by more than just people. AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity fetch pages live to answer questions, search engines crawl them for indexing, and AI labs crawl the web to train models. UseClick automatically detects this traffic and separates it from real human visitors, so your click analytics reflect actual reach — not crawler noise.
Why it matters
- Cleaner analytics — see your true human click-through rate without bot inflation
- AI visibility — know when ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity are actively citing and fetching your links
- SEO awareness — confirm that Googlebot and other search crawlers are actually reaching your links
- Zero setup — bot detection runs automatically on every click, on every plan
How detection works: UseClick inspects the user-agent string of every incoming request and matches it against a maintained list of known bot and crawler signatures. Detected traffic is tagged with a specific bot name (e.g.
GPTBot, Googlebot) and grouped into a category. This is signature-based (v1) — it does not currently cross-verify the requester's IP against each operator's published IP ranges.
Bot categories
Detected bots are grouped into four categories so you can tell at a glance what kind of traffic you're looking at:
| Category | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| AI Answer Engine | A person asked an AI assistant about your link, and it fetched the page live to answer them | ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, PerplexityBot |
| AI Training | A crawler collecting content to train or ground AI models | GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Google-Extended |
| Search Engine | A traditional search engine crawler indexing your link for search results | Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Baiduspider |
| Other Bot | Social-preview fetchers, monitoring tools, or generic scrapers/scripts | Slackbot, Twitterbot, curl, python-requests |
Where to see it
Open any link's analytics page in your dashboard. The Bot Traffic card shows:
- What percentage of total clicks came from detected bots
- A breakdown of every bot/crawler that hit the link, by name and category
- Click any bot in the list to filter the rest of the dashboard — including the click timeline and recent-clicks feed — down to just that bot's traffic
Tip: If you see AI Answer Engine traffic on a link, an AI assistant recently surfaced it to a real person — a strong signal that your content is being cited in AI-generated answers.
Related docs
- Website Analytics — full traffic breakdown for your website, not just link clicks
- Create Your First Link — start tracking clicks on a new short link