AI referrals & questions answered
AI referrals & questions answered
Section titled “AI referrals & questions answered”AI crawler hits tell you what the engines read. AI referrals tell you what humans did about it — the payoff side of AEO.
When a visitor arrives from an AI surface — the Referer host (or utm_source)
matches claude.ai, chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com,
gemini.google.com or your own ReferralHosts additions — the visit is recorded.
The AI Referrals page (Settings → Flowcourier → AEO Dashboard → AI
Referrals) turns those visits into a conversion metric.
Questions answered
Section titled “Questions answered”The headline metric is “questions answered”: a user-triggered crawler fetch (an Assistant-type crawler like ChatGPT-User or Claude-User reading your page to answer someone’s prompt — the “User-triggered” intent on the crawler dashboard) followed within 30 minutes by an AI-referred human visit to the same path. That pairing is the closest observable proxy for “someone asked an AI, it cited your page, and they clicked through”.
The page shows:
- Stat cards — AI referrals in the window, questions answered, the conversion rate (questions answered ÷ user-triggered fetches), and the user-triggered fetch count.
- Referrals per day — the trend over the selected Today / 7-day / 30-day window.
- By source — which AI surface sent the visitors (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, …).
- Questions answered — the conversion list: the page, the fetching bot, the referring surface, and the time gap between the fetch and the visit.
Privacy
Section titled “Privacy”Referral hits are recorded with no IP address, no user agent and no query
string — the path is stored without its query, utm_source is parsed and the
rest discarded — which keeps the FcAeoReferralHit table outside personal-data
scope by construction. Rows are kept forever by default
(ReferralRetentionDays: 0); set a positive number of days to prune older ones.
appsettings reference
Section titled “appsettings reference”All settings are optional, under Flowcourier:Aeo:CrawlerAnalytics:
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
ReferralHosts |
claude.ai, chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, gemini.google.com |
AI surfaces whose outbound clicks count as referrals (matched on Referer host, including subdomains, or utm_source). Configured entries are added to these built-in defaults, not replaced. |
ReferralRetentionDays |
0 |
Days of referral hits to keep; 0 keeps them forever. |
The correlation only needs crawler analytics to be on — referrals pair each AI-referred visit with the earlier User-triggered (Assistant-type) fetch of the same page, the intent described in AI crawler analytics.