AI Chatbots Overview report

Cloud On-Premise

The AI Chatbots Over Time and Overview reports show how chatbots access and consume your website content over time. The reports focus only on chatbot-driven activity and do not include human visit metrics.

Definition: AI chatbots give instant answers to explicit prompts and may fetch up-to-date content from websites without executing JavaScript or tracking by default. AI Agents go further by using a full browser like a human to work toward a goal over time, such as researching, filling out forms, or booking restaurants. Learn more about AI Assistants terminology.

Enable the plugin for On-Premise

To enable the AI Assistants reports, Matomo uses two plugins. The AIAgents plugin enables the AI Agent Overview reports, while the BotTracking plugin enables the AI Chatbots Overview reports. Both plugins are automatically activated for new Matomo Cloud and Matomo On-Premise installations. Existing On-Premise setups will need to activate the plugin manually.

  1. To enable the plugin, open Administration matomo admin gear icon > Plugins > Manage Plugins.
  2. Locate the AIAgents and BotTracking plugins under Installed Plugins and click Activate.

View the AI Chatbots reports

  1. From your Matomo dashboard, navigate to AI Assistants > AI Chatbots Overview.
  2. The reports include aggregated requests to show trends in volume, visit acquisition, content coverage, and crawl behaviour.

  3. To edit the Chatbots Over Time graph, click the metrics icon and select which data points you want displayed.
    matomo ai chatbot report

  4. The third report groups the AI Assistants – Chatbots that access your site with a breakdown of the URLs visited by chatbots.

Analyse AI Chatbot reports

The AI Chatbot reports support analysis of chatbot activity to understand how accessible and how frequently your content is retrieved in response to user prompts. The Overview report includes the following metrics:

  • requests: number of AI chatbot requests hitting your site.
  • acquired visits: number of visits to your website that originated from users clicking on a link in a chatbot’s response.
  • unique page URLs: number of different URLs requested by the AI chatbots.
  • orphaned pages: number of pages requested by AI chatbots that return a 404 (Not Found) status and are not linked internally. If there are repeat requests that trigger 404 errors, it might indicate outdated links on external sites or structural issues on your site.
  • click-through rate (CTR): percent of AI requests that resulted in acquired visits (calculated as acquired visits divide by total requests).
  • unique AI chatbots: number of different AI chatbots that accessed your site during the selected date range.
  • unique document URLs: number of unique document URLs, such as PDFs or other downloadable files, retrieved by AI chatbots.
  • pages with 5xx errors: number of page requests from AI chatbots that resulted in a 5xx server error, which may indicate configuration issues affecting content access.

Next steps

The AI Chatbot reports can be analysed together with the AI Agent Overview and AI Assistants Acquisition reports to optimise your site’s structure, and metadata. This can improve how AI assistants retrieve and reference your content in AI-generated answers or citations.

To extend reporting and monitor changes in chatbot activity over time and automate reporting on specific assistants or content patterns, define conditions for AI chatbots in Custom Alerts and set up Scheduled Reports.

Previous FAQ: AI Agent Overview report