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AI Traffic shows what AI systems and their users do with your site. Retrieval and citation evidence lead the story; referral sessions and conversions are the undercounted visible tail.

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Open AI Traffic

  1. Open your project
  2. In the sidebar, open Insights › AI Traffic
  3. Stay on Overview, or select Crawls & fetches, Referrals or 404 Demand

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Overview

Overview answers where demand is strong and where it leaks. A headline sentence states the window’s training crawls, answer fetches, referral sessions and conversion events.

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AI traffic signals

One card per stage of the journey: Where a source is not connected, the card shows no number instead of a zero, and Manage sources → opens Settings › Integrations. When findings from AI Traffic have been queued as work, a link above the cards reports how many related fixes are waiting in Actions.

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Top pages

A page table with Page, Answer fetches, Referral sessions and Conversions columns, ranked by answer fetches plus referral sessions for the window.

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Crawls & fetches

Crawls & fetches is the machine-traffic view. The headline and the two cards, Training crawls and Answer fetches, count verified requests: requests whose sending address DevTune confirmed against the networks the claimed operator publishes. Under each card, a muted line counts the rest as unknown (the address could not be checked) and identity mismatches (the address contradicted the claimed operator). See AI Traffic Overview for why a request can stay unknown. The reporting dates appear below the cards. If only the tracking snippet is connected, the Answer fetches card reads Server-side sensor required, because the snippet cannot see server-side answer fetches. Select Connect a sensor to add Cloudflare or edge middleware. Below the cards:
  • Daily crawls & fetches - one bar row per class, each bar split into verified, unknown and identity-mismatch requests
  • Platforms - Platform, Training crawls and Answer fetches, ordered by verified requests. A platform with identity mismatches carries a note with how many requests claimed it from outside its published ranges.
  • Recent answer fetches - answer-fetch records grouped by hour, with today’s answer fetches by platform

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Referrals

Referrals leads with two metrics: Referral sessions and Conversion events. Sessions come from the selected analytics provider, GA4 or PostHog, and are not people. Conversion events are the selected GA4 key events or PostHog events and actions reported for AI referral traffic, not unique customers. Daily referral sessions charts the same window. The reporting dates appear above the metrics. Recorded totals can include partial source coverage; an unavailable measurement is never presented as zero. If the analytics provider needs attention or conversions have not been selected, select Analytics in Integrations in the source notice.
  • Direct sessions per day shows GA4’s full daily direct sessions with the measured-page actual and baseline overlay. AI-correlated lift stays separate from referral counts and does not establish causation. See Direct traffic for coverage and classification rules.
  • By AI engine shows the session, conversion-event and engagement breakdown from the selected provider, ordered by conversion events and then sessions. Events per session is not the proportion of people who converted. Missing measurements remain unavailable for each engine. A link beside it opens the Measured actions tab in Results, where live actions are measured over their own before/after windows.
  • By page lists each Landing page with its Source, Sessions Δ and Conversion events, ordered by sessions. Previous, next and page-size controls move through the results; changing the reporting window starts at the first page.
Expand a landing page to see its current and previous average engagement time, engagement rate, and page value. Page value is the page’s share of AI-referred conversion events weighted by engagement rate; it is unavailable when either measure is missing. The API GET /v2/projects/{projectId}/traffic/referrals and MCP devtune_get_ai_referrals return the same engine breakdown in engines, alongside the paginated landing pages and the actual reporting dates in window. overview.referralCoverage reports sessionsCurrent, sessionsPrevious, conversionsCurrent, and conversionsPrevious. A false flag means the corresponding observed counts may be partial or unavailable. Compare periods only when both flags for that metric are true; this applies to overview, engine, and page counts.

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Page performance

Open Insights › Audit and select the Pages tab to compare Google Search Console clicks with AI citations for the same pages. Select a page to see its evidence, search impressions and position, citability, and next action. Pages are recommended by opportunity; use the sort selector to order them by a metric instead.

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404 Demand

The 404 Demand tab in Insights › AI Traffic is the detail view for missing-page demand. It reports a 30-day snapshot. Only a server-side crawler sensor, Cloudflare or edge middleware, sees requests for missing pages; the site snippet does not. A project with no traffic setup at all is sent to Settings › Integrations instead, and a project with only the snippet sees no 404 demand here.

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Project relevance

404 Demand ranks missing paths by assessed fit with your project, then by traffic demand. Each content finding shows whether it is relevant, adjacent, uncertain, or unrelated, with a reason. Use Sort by request volume to compare the loaded findings by their observed requests. The assessment uses your project context. Missing context, an ambiguous path, or an unavailable assessment appears as uncertain. After you change project context, prior assessments become uncertain until the next demand refresh reassesses them. Request counts and sensor coverage remain measured traffic evidence. Suggested actions use the same assessment: relevant paths receive full relevance weight, adjacent paths half, and uncertain paths a quarter. Clearly unrelated paths do not generate automatic suggestions. These weights set priority; they do not estimate visits or outcomes. Before drafting content, the 404 Demand triager checks existing content and whether the path fits the product.

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Search Console coverage

A saved Search Console row does not by itself verify every day in a reporting window. Dex and the search-rollup API/MCP response distinguish unavailable verification, partial evidence, verified zero, and complete totals. When coverage is partial, they report the available coverage dates and keep full-window totals unavailable. Historical rows without verified connection provenance are reported separately and do not count toward those totals. Use the dates returned with each source: search rollups end yesterday in Pacific time, while other dashboard windows can include today. Recent Search Console days may still be awaiting publication.

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Empty State

Until a sensor is connected, cards show no number rather than a zero. Select Manage sources → or Connect a sensor to open Settings › Integrations, connect a sensor, and wait a few minutes for data to appear.

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Reporting window

Choose 7, 30 or 90 days beside the tabs. The window applies to Overview, Crawls & fetches and Referrals. A Δ column compares the selected window against the one before it.

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Best Practices

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Monitor Bot Crawl Patterns

Track which AI bots crawl your site most frequently. If important content pages are not being crawled, review your robots.txt to ensure AI bots are not blocked from accessing key pages.

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Track Referral Growth

AI referral traffic is a lagging signal that some AI-driven visitors reached your site through attributable links. Growth in visible referrals can support the wider retrieval and visibility picture, but it does not measure total AI-driven demand.

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Pair with Visibility

Use AI Traffic alongside Visibility to connect retrieval evidence with its visible downstream tail:
  • Visibility shows whether AI platforms mention and cite your content in their responses
  • AI Traffic shows what AI systems retrieve and the referral sessions and conversions that can be attributed
AI referrals are systematically undercounted because most AI-driven visitors arrive as direct traffic. Treat referrals and conversions as lagging, visible evidence rather than a complete linear funnel.

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Review Top pages

The Top pages table shows which content has the most visible AI activity. Use this to:
  • Identify content with the most visible AI activity
  • Understand which types of content attract the most AI-referred visitors
  • Prioritize content updates for pages that receive heavy AI traffic

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Troubleshooting

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No Data Appearing

  • Verify the tracking snippet is installed correctly (check page source)
  • Confirm Snippet and middleware collection is switched on in Settings › Integrations
  • Check that ad blockers are not blocking requests (set up a proxy if needed)
  • Wait a few minutes for initial data to appear

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Low Bot Traffic

  • Check your robots.txt file for rules that might block AI crawlers
  • AI bot crawling frequency varies by platform and is not under your control

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Low Referral Traffic

  • Low referral traffic does not measure total AI-driven demand because most AI-driven visitors arrive as direct traffic
  • Review Insights › Visibility to see if your presence rate is high but referrals are low
  • Consider improving your content to be more actionable, encouraging users to visit your site

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Next Steps