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The AI Demand stage 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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Accessing AI Demand

  1. Select your project from the account home page
  2. In the sidebar, open AI Demand → Traffic Journey
  3. Stay on Overview, or switch to Crawls & fetches or Referrals

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Overview

Overview answers where demand is strong and where it leaks.

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AI demand signals

A funnel across the journey, with the ratio between each pair of stages: Between the stages, DevTune shows conversion ratios such as citations per crawl, sessions per citation, and citation efficiency in sessions per fetch. Where no source is connected, the stage links to Connect in Settings → Connectors instead of showing a number. Upstream, the funnel links back to Visibility; downstream, it hands off to Outcomes. When findings from this stage have been queued as work, a link reports how many related fixes are waiting in Actions.

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Daily trend

One chart combining crawls as bars on the left axis with fetches and referrals as lines on the right axis, so a crawl spike and its downstream response stay readable at different scales.

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Direct traffic

GA4’s full direct total as bars, with measured-page actual and baseline as lines. A highlighted span marks direct sessions above baseline while AI answer exposure held and no other channel grew to match. See Direct traffic for how to read it.

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Top pages

A ranked page table with Page, Fetches Δ, Referrals Δ, Human · agent, and Conversions columns. Agent columns read — agent · no source yet until agent detection ships.

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Crawls & fetches

Crawls & fetches is the machine-traffic view. The headline and the two KPI cards, Training crawls and Answer fetches, count verified requests only: requests whose sending address DevTune confirmed against the networks the claimed operator publishes. Under each card, a muted line shows only the non-zero remainder: before verification for older records, no address from sensor, no operator contract when the operator publishes no supported way to check its addresses, check unavailable when a published check could not complete, and failed when the address contradicted the claimed operator. A caption below the cards states the reporting dates and the share of observed requests that could be checked at all, so a verified-only headline is never mistaken for a drop. Below it:
  • Daily crawls & fetches - one bar row per class on a shared count scale, each bar stacked by verdict: verified, unknown, failed
  • Platform table - Platform, Training crawls, Answer fetches and a Verification pill (verified, failed, or unverifiable when nothing could be checked), ordered by verified requests. A failed platform carries a note with how many requests claimed it from outside its published ranges.

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Referrals

Referrals shows two metrics: Referral sessions and Conversion events. Sessions are GA4 sessions, not people. Conversion events are the selected GA4 key events reported for AI referral traffic, not unique customers. Choose 7, 30 or 90 days below the tabs. The reporting dates appear above the metrics. Recorded totals can include partial source coverage; an unavailable measurement is never presented as zero. If GA4 needs attention or key events have not been selected, open Integrations from the source notice.
  • Direct traffic shows GA4’s full daily Direct sessions and the existing 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.
  • Landing pages lists the source, sessions and conversion events, ordered by sessions. Previous, next and page-size controls traverse the results; changing the reporting window starts at the first page.
  • By AI engine retains the GA4 session, conversion-event and engagement breakdown, 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.
Open Measured actions in Outcomes to inspect shipped actions in the same project. Those measurements use their own before/after windows. 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. Existing Conversions bookmarks open Referrals with the same supported reporting window. 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 Audit → Pages 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. Existing Search Performance bookmarks open Audit Pages and preserve a valid reporting window.

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404 Demand

The 404 Demand tab beside Traffic Journey is the detail view for missing-page demand.

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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

If no traffic data has been collected yet, the stage displays a setup prompt with a link to Project settings → Integrations. Connect a sensor and wait a few minutes for data to appear.

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Reporting window

A reporting-window control at the top of the stage sets the period every view uses. Delta columns compare 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 Search Probes

Use AI Demand alongside Search Probes to connect retrieval evidence with its visible downstream tail:
  • Search Probes shows whether AI platforms mention and cite your content in their responses
  • AI Demand 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 tracking is enabled on the Integrations tab of Project settings
  • 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 your AI Search data 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