Original Summary

Everyone here is talking about getting cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity. I got curious about what that looks like from the server side, so I went through the logs of four small B2B sites I run, over 27 days. 2,817 verified fetches from the crawlers AI assistants use to read pages before citing them. 5 visits that arrived with an AI referrer. That's the first thing I didn't expect. Being read by the engine and getting a visitor from it are two separate events, and the gap between them is huge. Second thing. Before counting anything I checked every request that claimed to be an AI bot the way the vendors say to verify them. 85% of them failed. Scrapers love wearing an AI crawler's user agent. So if your "AI traffic" dashboard count user agents, most of what it shows you is fake, and the real number is a lot smaller and a lot more boring. Third one changed how I think about the content side. We ran the same set of buyer questions through the APIs of the four big assistants, many times over a month, and logged when they searched the web. On ChatGPT, questions like "best tool for X" triggered a search about 10% of the time. Questions that named a competitor ("X vs Y", "alternatives to Y") triggered one 84% of the time. Which means the category question is mostly answered from memory. Whatever you publish this week won't change it for a while. The comparison question is where a fresh page can get fetched and quoted, today. What I'd take from it, for what it's worth: Check your logs before buying a tracking tool. You'll see which pages the citation crawlers read, and whether they're the ones you'd expect. Stop measuring AI visibility by referral traffic. It will look like zero even when you're being read thousands of times. If there's a return, my guess is it shows up as direct visits, and I haven't found a clean way to attribute those yet. If you want fresh content to matter, write the comparison page your buyers are asking for, competitor's name included. For a SaaS that means your "vs" and "alternatives" pages. Small sample, four sites, one month, so I'm not claiming this generalises. Curious if anyone else has looked at their raw logs instead of a dashboard. Do you see the same gap between crawler reads and actual visits?   submitted by   /u/HerveDhelin [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/22 13:55:33