Bot visits
Bot visits are the requests AI bots make to your website, which you can see in your server logs.
Bot visits are the times an AI company's bot comes to your website and asks for a page. Each request shows up in your server logs with the bot's name, the page it asked for and whether it got it.
They're the closest you can get to seeing the AI platforms read your site. Your robots.txt says what bots may read. Bot visits show what they actually did.
What they tell you
Bot visits answer questions your other numbers can't:
- Which AI companies read your site, and how often
- Which pages they read, and which they never touch
- Which requests failed, because a page was missing, blocked by your firewall, or erroring
- Whether a change you made, like a new page or a fixed robots.txt rule, brought the bots back
For example, Kestrel Roasters publishes a new guide to grinders. A week later, its logs show search bots from two AI companies have read the guide, and a third hasn't visited at all. That tells Kestrel which platforms could already be using the guide in answers.
Checking the visit is real
Anyone can give their program the name of a known AI bot. So a visit from "GPTBot" might not be from OpenAI at all. To be sure, the request's address is checked against the list the company publishes, or looked up to confirm it belongs to the company.
In AnswerOrbit
The Bot visits tab in Website shows the AI bots that visited your site, which pages they read and which requests failed. You'll need to connect your server logs first, from Cloudflare, Vercel, CloudFront, WordPress and other hosts. We check every request, and ones that fail the check are shown as Unverified requests and don't count. We count up to 40,000 bot visits a month for each brand. See Website and AI traffic.