AI Chatbots Overview report

Cloud On-Premise

The AI Chatbots Over Time and Overview reports show how AI chatbots access and retrieve content from your website. These reports help you understand how often chatbots request your pages and which content they use to generate responses.

How Matomo tracks AI chatbot activity

AI chatbots retrieve website content differently from human visitors. When chatbots access website content, the AI provider sends requests from its servers directly to your website. These requests do not load a browser or execute JavaScript, so the standard Matomo tracking script cannot detect them.

To measure this activity, Matomo relies on server-side integrations that run on the following supported platforms:

Server-side tracking

When a request from a known AI chatbot reaches your website, the server-side integration running on Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or WordPress identifies the request based on its user agent. The tracking request is recorded in Matomo and displayed in the AI Chatbots reports.

Server-side tracking must be configured because AI chatbots request content directly from servers and do not execute JavaScript. This prevents the standard Matomo tracking script from detecting their activity.

Setup server-side AI chatbot tracking in Matomo

To use the AI Chatbots reports, you will need to complete the following steps covered in this guide:

  1. Enable the BotTracking plugin (On-Premise only). This feature is enabled for Matomo Cloud.
  2. Install the server-side integration.
  3. View and analyse the AI Chatbots reports in Matomo.

Enable the BotTracking plugin (On-Premise)

The AI Chatbots reports are automatically enabled for Matomo Cloud. On-Premise setups will need to activate the BotTracking plugin manually.

  1. In Matomo, go to Administration matomo admin gear icon > Plugins > Manage Plugins.
  2. Locate BotTracking under Installed Plugins and click Activate.

Install the server-side integration

  1. In Matomo, open AI Assistants > AI Chatbots Overview.

  2. Click Set up AI Chatbot tracking now.
    setup ai chatbot tracking

  3. Follow the on-screen instructions and refer to the relevant setup guide for: Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, or WordPress.

Once configured, Matomo can record AI chatbot requests and display the AI Chatbots reports.

View the AI Chatbots reports

  1. From your Matomo dashboard, navigate to AI Assistants > AI Chatbots Overview.
  2. Data will appear once chatbots start accessing your website content.
  3. The reports include aggregated requests to show trends in volume, visit acquisition, content coverage, and crawl behaviour.

  4. To edit the Chatbots Over Time graph, click the metrics icon and select which data points to display.
    view ai chatbots reports

  5. The third report groups the AI Chatbots and the URLs they accessed on your site.

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.
  • Unique document URLs: number of unique document URLs, such as PDFs or other downloadable files, retrieved by AI chatbots.
  • 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.
  • Not found requests: 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.
  • 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.

Segmentation and AI reports

AI assistant-related reports do not support segmentation at this time. AI assistant data cannot be segmented by visitor attributes, actions, or sessions because these reports are based on server-side chatbot requests rather than tracked sessions.

ai reports do not support segmentation

Standard date range filters still apply to AI reports and segmentation continues to work for standard Matomo reports.

Next steps

Analysing the AI Chatbots reports alongside the AI Agents Overview and AI Assistants Acquisition reports provides a more complete view of how AI systems interact with your content.

These reports can identify which pages AI systems retrieve most frequently and whether those interactions result in acquired visits. To monitor chatbot activity over time, define conditions in Custom Alerts and configure Scheduled Reports to receive regular updates.

Previous FAQ: AI Agent Overview report