What AI assistants asked
What AI assistants asked
Section titled “What AI assistants asked”The question everyone wants answered: someone asked an AI about my product — what did they ask? The honest answer first: no AI surface transmits the user’s prompt to your site. Not in the crawler fetch, not in the click-through. Everything below is about approximating it as well as the web allows.
What each surface actually sends
Section titled “What each surface actually sends”| Surface | On the fetch (AI reads your page) | On the click (human follows a citation) |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | ChatGPT-User user agent |
Referer chatgpt.com and/or utm_source=chatgpt.com |
| Claude (claude.ai) | Claude-User user agent |
Referer claude.ai; no utm |
| Claude (Desktop app) | Claude-User user agent |
Usually nothing — apps open your browser with no referer |
| Perplexity | Perplexity-User user agent |
utm_source=perplexity; referer often stripped |
| Gemini app | Gemini fetchers (googleagent-urlcontext, …) |
Referer gemini.google.com |
| Google AI Overviews / AI Mode | Served from Google’s index — often no fetch at all | Bare google.com referer — indistinguishable from organic search, so AEO deliberately does not count it as an AI referral |
| Copilot | MicrosoftPreview/Copilot fetchers |
Referer copilot.microsoft.com |
Two consequences worth internalising:
- A fair share of real AI-driven visits arrive with neither referer nor utm and land as “Direct” in every analytics tool, not just AEO. The Referrals page shows the detectable floor, never the true total.
- Google’s AI surfaces are special: answers come from the index, so there may be no read to record, and clicks can’t be attributed. Google’s own Search Console generative-AI performance report (added June 2026) is the only source for AI Overviews / AI Mode impressions — it has no API yet, so AEO links out rather than integrating. We’ll revisit when the API exposes it.
AEO’s honest proxies
Section titled “AEO’s honest proxies”- The page title. When an assistant reads
/blog/upgrade-to-umbraco-17/, the best available signal for “what was asked” is what that page answers. The Referrals tab resolves every read and conversion to its page title; a Markdown read (.md) resolves to the same page. - Questions answered. A read followed within 30 minutes by an AI-referred visit to the same page is the closest observable version of “someone asked, the AI cited you, and they clicked”.
- Query strings (opt-in, from 17.5.9). With
Flowcourier:Aeo:CrawlerAnalytics:CaptureQueryStringsenabled, AEO stores the query string on crawler hits and referrals (truncated to 400 chars). Occasionally an assistant fetches a search-style URL whose?q=reveals a literal question. Off by default: query strings can carry personal data, and enabling this is a conscious privacy decision — see the configuration reference.