Website hit
A website hit is any single request to a web server, for a page, an image, a script or a font. One page view can be dozens of hits.
A website hit is one request to a web server for one file. Opening a single page can make dozens of hits: one for the HTML, then more for every image, stylesheet, script and font on it. Bots make hits too, every time they fetch something.
The word comes from the early web, when hits were the main traffic number, and "a million hits" sounded impressive. It's a poor measure of people, because it counts files, not visitors. A page with 40 images makes 41 hits for one view.
Hits, page views and visits
Analytics tools count people. A page view is one page loaded in a browser. A visit, or session, is one person's time on your site. A hit is one file requested. So a hundred people reading one page each might make a hundred page views and several thousand hits.
Where hits are still useful is in your server logs. Each line in a log is one hit, with who asked, for what, and what the server answered. That's the only place you see bots that don't run scripts, which analytics tools never record.
For example, Harrow & Pine's analytics show 5,000 visits last week. Its server logs show 900,000 hits. Most of the difference is images and scripts, and a good share is bots, including the ones AI platforms send to read its pages.
Hits from AI bots
AI bots usually fetch just the HTML of a page, without the images or scripts. So in your logs, each of their hits is roughly one page read. Counting those hits by bot, page and response tells you what each AI platform reads and where it fails.
In AnswerOrbit
The Bot visits tab in Website shows the AI bots that visited your site, which pages they read and which requests failed. Connect your server logs to see it. We check every request against the addresses each AI company publishes before we count it, and requests that fail are shown as Unverified requests. We count up to 40,000 bot visits a month for each brand. See Website and AI traffic.