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 AI 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 AI Referrals page 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.