AI Referral Traffic

AI Referral Traffic shows you the visitors that AI agents send to your store. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or another AI assistant a question and clicks through to your store from the answer, that visit is captured here.

Optimizing for AEO is only half the job — this screen is where you prove it worked. Instead of guessing whether AI assistants are driving real people to your store, you get the numbers: how many AI-referred visits you get, which AI agents send them, and which pages they land on.

How it works

1. The app detects visits that arrive from known AI agents (by referring domain and, where available, the link's utm_source tag).
2. Each visit is matched to an AI agent and classified. Visits it cannot match yet are kept as unassigned so you can review and label them.
3. The screen aggregates everything into an overview, charts, and tables you can filter by time range.

Who is it for?

• Merchants optimizing for AEO who want to measure the payoff of AI files (llms.txt, agent.md, Markdown Alternate pages)
• Store owners who want to know which AI assistants actually drive traffic to them
• Marketers tracking a new, fast-growing traffic channel alongside search and social

Key benefits

• Proof of AEO value — real visit numbers, not estimates
• Per-agent breakdown — see exactly which AI agents send traffic and in what proportion
• Trend over time — spot growth or drops day by day
• Page-level insight — know which products and pages AI sends people to
• Extendable — add or classify AI agents the app doesn't recognize yet

Turn on AI referral tracking

1. Open Avada AEO Optimizer and go to AI referral traffic in the sidebar.
2. Toggle the master switch next to the page title.

Once on, the app starts recording AI-referred visits. Data is collected from the moment you enable it — there is no historical backfill.

Overview

The top of the page shows three metrics:

• Total AI agent visits — every visit the app identified as coming from an AI agent
• Classified visits — visits matched to a specific AI agent
• Unassigned visits — visits from a source the app hasn't matched to a known agent yet

Use the Last 7 / 30 / 90 days selector to change the time range. It controls the whole page — the charts and tables update together. Click Resync to pull the latest data on demand.

Top AI agents

A donut chart showing the share of traffic from each AI agent, largest first. The legend lists each agent with a colored marker matching its slice, plus its percentage. Hover a percentage to see the exact visit count.

• Agents with 0 visits are hidden to keep the list clean.
• Sources that don't belong to a recognized AI agent are grouped into Others at the bottom. Hover Others to see what's inside.

Traffic over time

A line chart of AI-referred visits per day (both classified and unassigned), following the time range you picked in the Overview. Hover any point to see that day's visit count. If there's no AI traffic in the period, the chart shows a short empty message.

Top traffic pages

The pages AI agents send the most traffic to, as a full table.

• Tabs by page type — All, Products, Collections, Blog posts, Pages, Other. Each tab counts how many pages fall into it. The type is inferred from the page's URL.
• Search and sort — search by path, sort by Visits or by Page name (A→Z / Z→A).
• Columns — Page (path), Visits, and Share (%). Long paths are shortened; hover to see the full path.
• Pagination — choose 10 / 20 / 50 / 100 items per page.

Manage AI agents

Control which AI agents the app recognizes in your traffic. Two tabs:

• Your agents — the agents you've added manually. Many popular agents are detected automatically, so you only add ones the app doesn't cover.
• Unclassified sources — traffic the app couldn't match to a known AI agent. If one of these is an AI agent, click Use to add it (the form opens pre-filled).

Add a custom agent

Click Add agent (on the Your agents tab) to open the form:

1. Agent name — the name you'll see in your reports (e.g. Example AI).
2. Domain — the site the visits come from, domain only, without https:// or a page path (e.g. exampleai.com).
3. utm_source (optional) — fill this in if the agent tags its links with a utm_source; visits carrying that value are counted too.

The form also lists the agents already detected automatically, so you don't add a duplicate.

Recent visits

A log of the latest AI-referred sessions, newest first:

• Time — when the visit happened
• AI agent — the matched agent, or the source domain if it isn't classified yet
• Landing page — the page the visitor arrived on

Recent visits is a plain time-ordered log — no tabs or search — with the same pagination options as Top traffic pages (10 / 20 / 50 / 100 per page).

FAQs

Why don't I see any data?

Data is only collected after you turn the feature on, and only when AI agents actually send visitors to your store. Give it a few days. You can also click Resync to pull the latest data.

What counts as an 'AI agent visit'?

A visit that arrives from a known AI agent — detected by the referring domain or a link's utm_source tag. Regular search, social, and direct traffic are not counted here.

What are 'unassigned' visits?

Visits from a source the app hasn't matched to a known AI agent yet. If you recognize a source as an AI agent, add it under Manage AI agents so future visits from it are classified.

Can I track an AI agent the app doesn't know?

Yes. Go to Manage AI agents → Add agent and enter the agent's name and domain (and utm_source if it uses one). New visits matching it will be classified from then on.