Description
Search is moving inside AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google’s AI a question, those assistants quietly fetch real web pages — and those fetches are the new impressions. Most analytics tools never show them, because AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript and don’t appear in client-side analytics.
Aiso AI Crawler Analytics reads the requests that actually hit your server and turns them into a clean, agency-ready dashboard right inside wp-admin. Think of it as the “AI visibility” companion to your security log — focused entirely on AI search performance instead of threats.
What you get
- Headline KPIs — total AI-crawler hits, “chat impressions” (live fetches during AI answers), distinct crawlers, and pages crawled.
- By AI platform — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, Google/Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and more.
- By crawler / user-agent — the exact bots (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Bingbot, Bytespider, Applebot…).
- By purpose — training vs. citation-indexing vs. live chat impressions vs. search vs. agentic browsing, so you know whether a bot is just training a model or actively quoting you in an answer.
- By page — which URLs AI assistants read most, with per-page impression counts.
- Over time — a daily activity chart so you can see trends and spikes.
- Live hit log — recent crawler visits with country and a source-IP verification badge that flags possible spoofed user-agents.
- CSV export — hand clients a report in one click.
Built for agencies
Connect the plugin to a free Aiso account and every site you manage reports into one central place, so your AI-visibility data is kept long-term and viewable across your whole portfolio. Not an agency? The plugin works completely on its own — install it and the dashboard fills up locally with nothing sent anywhere.
Privacy-first
Visitor IPs are anonymised by default (stored only as a salted hash). The plugin records AI-crawler requests, not your human visitors, and never transmits any data externally until you explicitly connect an Aiso account.
External services
This plugin connects to the Aiso API (https://www.getaiso.com) only when you enable syncing by connecting an account. It is used to (a) optionally generate an API key for your site and (b) store your AI-crawler hits centrally so they are retained long-term and can be viewed across multiple sites.
- When data is sent: only while “Send data to Aiso” is enabled in Settings, and only for AI-crawler hits (not human visitors).
- What is sent: the requested path and URL, the crawler’s user-agent, the detected bot and company, an optionally-hashed source IP, a two-letter country code, the HTTP status, a timestamp, your site URL, and your Aiso API key.
- What is not sent: human-visitor analytics, post content, or personal data of your readers.
By connecting an account you agree to Aiso’s terms and privacy policy:
- Terms: https://www.getaiso.com/quick_links/terms_of_service
- Privacy policy: https://www.getaiso.com/quick_links/privacy_policy
If you never connect an account, the plugin makes no external requests and stores all data locally on your own server.
Installation
- Upload the
aiso-ai-crawler-analyticsfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install it from Plugins Add New in your dashboard. - Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen.
- Open AI Crawlers in the admin menu to see your dashboard. It starts filling up as AI crawlers visit your site.
- (Optional) Go to AI Crawlers Settings and click Connect to link a free Aiso account so your data is stored long-term and aggregated across all your sites.
To test it immediately, request your home page with a crawler user-agent:
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GPTBot/1.1; +https://openai.com/gptbot)" https://yourdomain.com/
Reload the dashboard after a few seconds and the hit appears.
FAQ
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Do I need an account to use this?
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No. The dashboard works fully on its own using a local table — nothing is sent anywhere. An Aiso account is optional and only adds long-term, cross-site storage.
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What are “chat impressions”?
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Some crawlers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User, DuckAssistBot…) fetch a page the moment an AI assistant is answering a user. That live fetch is the closest equivalent to an impression inside the chat, so we surface it as its own metric.
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Will this slow down my site?
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No. Non-AI traffic does zero database work. For the small fraction of requests that are AI crawlers, a single row is written on shutdown, and any upload to Aiso happens after the response has already been sent to the visitor (via fastcgi_finish_request where available).
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How accurate is detection?
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Detection is user-agent based, matching the Aiso AI-bot directory. Where a provider publishes official IP ranges (OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Amazon, Meta, Common Crawl, Huawei, Parallel.ai), the plugin also checks the source IP and flags mismatches as possible spoofs.
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Does it work behind Cloudflare or a CDN?
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Yes. It reads common edge headers (CF-Connecting-IP, CF-IPCountry, etc.) to recover the real client IP and country.
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How is this different from a security plugin like Wordfence or Cerber?
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Those focus on threats. This focuses on AI-search visibility: who from the AI world is reading your content, what they read, and when — framed as marketing impressions, not security events.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Aiso AI Crawler Analytics” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- Initial release: local AI-crawler dashboard (platform, crawler, purpose, page, over-time breakdowns), source-IP verification, CSV export, and optional sync to a central Aiso account.