Set up AI Chatbot tracking with WordPress

Cloud On-Premise

AI chatbots may access your WordPress site to retrieve information when an AI assistant reads your content to answer a user’s question or gather sources. This AI chatbot activity does not appear in standard visitor reports.

Matomo Analytics for WordPress supports AI chatbot telemetry to record this activity separately. Matomo tracks requests that are made on behalf of a human user by supported AI assistants. It does not track autonomous crawlers or training data collection.

This guide explains how AI chatbot tracking works in Matomo for WordPress and how to verify reports are displaying correctly.

How AI chatbot telemetry works in Matomo

AI chatbot telemetry uses the standard Matomo tracking endpoint (matomo.php) but follows a dedicated processing path. When a request is detected from an AI chatbot:

  • No visit attribution logic is executed.
  • No data is written to visit-related tables such as log_visit or log_link_visit_action.
  • Telemetry data is stored in dedicated chatbot telemetry tables.
  • URLs are resolved through log_action without performing visit lookups.
  • The telemetry request includes Page URL, User-Agent, HTTP status code, Response size, and Server processing time.
  • Requests are not tracked for images, robots.txt, admin-ajax.php, sitemap pages, and WordPress admin pages.

This behaviour is automatic and does not require additional configuration once telemetry requests are sent.

Supported AI chatbots and detection rules

Matomo detects AI chatbots based on User-Agent substring matching to ensure AI chatbot traffic is always processed separately from human visits. A request is classified as a chatbot when its User-Agent contains one of the following substrings (minimum supported list):

ChatGPT-User
MistralAI-User
Gemini-Deep-Research
Claude-User
Perplexity-User
GoogleAgent
NovaAct

Detection cannot be overridden and requests identified as AI chatbots are always processed in no-visit mode.

Before you setup tracking

If a caching plugin serves static HTML directly via .htaccess (bypassing PHP by delivering a saved version of the page directly from the server), WordPress cannot send AI chatbot telemetry because its code does not execute. In this case, AI chatbot requests will not be tracked.

WordPress administrators
If you manage your site directly in WordPress and have not configured AI chatbot tracking in a CDN, follow the instructions below to Install with WordPress. No additional setup steps are required.

Advanced configuration (CDN or caching)
If you have configured AI chatbot tracking in your CDN, do not enable AI chatbot tracking in WordPress as well. If AI chatbots are tracking in both the CDN and WordPress, Matomo will record the same request twice.

Set up AI Chatbot tracking

AI chatbot reports only collect data after updating or installing version xxx of the Matomo plugin for WordPress.

  1. Where an AI chatbot report shows no data has been collected, click the link Set up AI Chatbot tracking now.
    ai report no data message
  2. Choose the WordPress tracking method and follow the on-screen instructions in Matomo to guide you through the installation.
  3. AI chatbot reports only collect data after setting up chatbot tracking. If you open an AI chatbot report and see a No data collected message, you will need to configure chatbot telemetry for your environment.
  4. Install the Matomo plugin through the WordPress plugins directory (recommended).
  5. Activate the plugin.
  6. For the Connect Matomo plugin, configure the settings as required and include your Matomo URL.
  7. Enable AI chatbot tracking (if not enabled by default).
  8. Save the updated settings.

Verify tracking is enabled

AI chatbot traffic is not user-initiated, so data may not appear immediately after setup. After AI chatbots access your site and Matomo receives valid chatbot telemetry, the No data message on reports disappears automatically. To verify that tracking is enabled:

  1. Open the relevant AI chatbot reports in Matomo > AI Assistants.
    matomo ai chatbot report
  2. Confirm that the No data message no longer appears.
  3. Check that requests from supported AI chatbots are listed.

Data retention

AI chatbot telemetry is stored as raw log data in Matomo. This data follows the same retention and cleanup rules as other raw tracking logs. When the Delete old raw data from the database setting is enabled, Matomo automatically removes AI chatbot telemetry after the configured retention period.

  • No visit or aggregated data is created from this telemetry.
  • No additional configuration is required to enable cleanup.
  • Deletion affects all stored AI chatbot telemetry.

This behaviour applies to both Matomo Cloud and Matomo On-Premise instances.

Other set up methods

If you do not want to implement AI chatbot tracking directly in WordPress, you can configure tracking at the infrastructure level instead. Matomo provides separate guides for setting up AI chatbot tracking with Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or by using the HTTP Tracking API for custom server-side integrations. Read the set up guide for AI chatbot tracking and choose the method that matches your environment.

Previous FAQ: Set up AI Chatbot tracking with Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront