AI Traffic Types
Understanding the different types of AI traffic SeeLLM detects and classifies.
How SeeLLM Classifies Traffic
SeeLLM categorizes every visit into one of three traffic types based on server-side signals: user agent strings, request patterns, header analysis, and ASN lookups.
Human Traffic
Regular browser visits from real users. These show standard browser user agents, accept HTML content, load assets (CSS, JS, images), and typically include referrer headers.
Search AI Traffic
Visits from AI platforms that are actively serving your content to users. This is the most valuable AI traffic — it means your content is being cited or referenced in AI conversations.
Examples:
- ChatGPT — OpenAI's assistant fetching your page to answer a user's question
- Claude — Anthropic's assistant referencing your content
- Perplexity — AI search engine citing your page in results
- Google AI Overview — Google's AI-generated search summaries
Scraper / Crawler Traffic
AI bots that crawl your site for training data or indexing. These visits don't directly serve your content to users but may influence future AI model behavior.
Examples:
- GPTBot — OpenAI's training data crawler
- ClaudeBot — Anthropic's web crawler
- Applebot — Apple's crawler (used for Apple Intelligence)
- Amazonbot — Amazon's crawler
AI Source Detection
SeeLLM identifies 25+ AI platforms by analyzing:
| Signal | What It Reveals |
|---|---|
| User Agent | Bot identity (e.g., GPTBot/1.0) |
| ASN | Network origin (e.g., OpenAI's IP ranges) |
| Accept headers | Content preferences (bots often prefer JSON) |
| Request patterns | No asset loading, rapid sequential requests |
| Referrer | AI platform origin (e.g., chat.openai.com) |
Why This Matters
Understanding the difference between a ChatGPT crawl and a ChatGPT referral is critical:
- Crawl = the bot is indexing your content (no immediate user value)
- Referral = a real user asked ChatGPT about something and it's fetching your page to answer them (direct user value)
SeeLLM tracks both, so you can measure the full AI funnel: from being crawled, to being cited, to driving actual human visits.