With the 5.8.0 release of its platform, Matomo introduces new capabilities designed to help organizations better understand and measure the growing impact of AI assistants on website traffic.The new version provides efficient, privacy-first tools that help teams better understand their traffic in the age of AI and generate stronger insights for decision-making.
Wellington, 18 March 2026 – Matomo, the world’s leading privacy-first and ethical open-source analytics platform, announced the release of Matomo 5.8.0, the latest version of its web-analytics platform bringing new capabilities to enhance analytics insights in the age of AI. With this release, Matomo introduces AI chatbot tracking, a new report within its AI Assistant tracking capabilities. This report helps organisations understand how AI chatbots interact with their websites. Combined with the existing AI Agents report, it provides a clearer view on how AI tools access and analyse website content.
AI chatbots are redefining web analytics
Nowadays, companies face a new challenge: distinguishing between human visitors and interactions generated by AI chatbots. Without this differentiation, web analytics data becomes increasingly unreliable, affecting executive decision-making.
AI-driven traffic is not limited to a single type of interaction. It includes AI agents, which can autonomously browse or perform actions on websites, AI chatbots, which access and analyse website content to generate responses within their interfaces; and AI referrals, where users visit a website after clicking on links suggested by AI tools.
Matomo users can identify AI referrals directly in their acquisition reports, helping them understand how AI platforms influence website traffic and search visibility.
With its AI Assistants solution, Matomo offers dedicated tracking for AI chatbots and AI agents, providing businesses with a clearer picture of how AI interactions impact website traffic. This prevents AI interactions from distorting marketing attribution, traffic metrics, and conversion reporting.
“Without visibility into AI-driven traffic, analytics data becomes less reliable and less actionable. This challenge affects every team that relies on website data, from marketing to leadership. It’s crucial to be able to distinguish between human visitors and AI assistants in order to make informed business decisions,” said Matthieu Aubry, CPO and Co-founder of Matomo.
This release is part of Matomo’s broader strategy to position itself as a leader in AI-driven web analytics. Build on privacy-first foundation, Matomo enables organisations to understand both AI and human engagement on their websites while remaining fully compliant with data protection regulations. This privacy-led-by-design approach ensures that analytics insights remain accurate, trustworthy, and align with modern data expectations.
Privacy-first analytics built for the age of AI
As AI chatbots and automated agents increasingly interact with websites, many analytics tools struggle to interpret this traffic because they rely heavily on cookies and user identifiers, mechanisms that AI systems often reject or bypass. Built on first-party data and transparent measurement, Matomo’s privacy-first architecture allows organisations to detect and analyse these interactions more reliably. This provides clearer visibility into how AI systems access, read, and engage with website content
“As a privacy-first analytics platform, Matomo is independent from third-party cookies and invasive tracking, which is totally adapted to the requirements of the AI era. This release reinforces our human-first analytics approach, enabling our clients to accurately detect AI traffic while maintaining trustworthy web analytics results,” said Adam Taylor, CEO of Matomo.
About Matomo:
Matomo is a leading web analytics platform that helps organisations understand their audience and gives them full control over their data. More than 1.4 million websites in over 190 countries use Matomo to improve digital experiences and make confident decisions.
Available on-premise or in the cloud, Matomo combines powerful analytics with data ownership, flexibility, and privacy through its open-source foundation.
More information: Matomo.org
Media contact
Elise Duchateau
Head of Marketing and Communications
Matomo (InnoCraft Ltd.)
marketing@matomo.org
