What are AI Assistants in Matomo

Cloud On-Premise

AI-powered systems are becoming a new gateway to the web and are changing how people discover information online. Instead of typing queries into search engines and browsing results, many users now rely on AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini to generate answers and recommend websites.

With AI assistants, visitors are reaching your website in new ways. A user may click a link suggested by an AI tool, or an automated AI system may access your website directly to retrieve or analyse content. Matomo provides several reports to help analyse these interactions.

This guide explains the terminology used in Matomo and how to use the AI-related reports.

AI Assistants terminology

Matomo AI reports help analyse how AI systems interact with your website. These reports use three related concepts:

  • Acquisition > AI Assistants: shows visits from human users who arrive at your website after interacting with AI-powered tools (including chat-based and autonomous assistants).
  • AI Assistants > AI Agents: identifies requests made by autonomous AI systems that perform tasks without continuous user input. For example, AI agents can navigate a website to book a table or fill out a form. This report compares the AI-driven activity with human visits.
  • AI Assistants > AI Chatbots: measures how AI chatbots retrieve content from your website through server-side requests. This requires setting up additional tracking to capture server requests by AI chatbots and send them to Matomo.

Each report uses different detection methods that help with analysing content discovery and site engagement that originate from AI-powered tools.

Why Matomo uses AI Assistants

To keep reporting consistent and comprehensive, Matomo uses AI Assistants as the unified label for both chatbot- and agent-based traffic sources. This provides a clearer view of how AI tools contribute to website engagement, conversions, and overall acquisition performance. You can find the AI-related reports in Matomo under the Acquisition and AI Assistants report menus.

AI Assistants channel

AI Assistants represent AI-powered tools that generate responses that may include links to external websites. When a user clicks one of these links and visits your website, Matomo records the visit in the AI Assistants acquisition channel. This traffic represents human visitors who arrive at your website after interacting with an AI assistant, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini.

In Matomo > Acquisition > AI Assistants, the report shows how AI-powered tools contribute to user acquisition, similar to other channels such as search or social media.

Matomo product screenshot showing the "AI Assistants" menu.

AI Agents

AI Agents are autonomous systems that perform tasks or retrieve information without requiring continuous user input. After receiving an instruction, an agent can interact with websites, collect information, or perform actions automatically. From Matomo 5.6.0 (On-Premise), the AI Agent Overview and AI Agent Over Time reports identify requests made by AI agents and distinguish them from human visitors. This allows you to compare how automated systems and human visitors interact with your website.

In Matomo > AI Assistants > AI Agent Overview, the report shows these visits detected through standard tracking requests, such as client-side tracking or other requests identified by Matomo as originating from AI agents.

view ai agents overtime report

AI Chatbots

AI Chatbots retrieve content from websites to generate responses for users. Unlike human visitors, chatbots do not load pages in a browser and they send requests directly from its servers to your website to retrieve page content. Because these requests do not execute JavaScript, the standard Matomo tracking script cannot detect them.

To measure this activity, Matomo uses server-side tracking integrations with Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, or WordPress. Once configured, these integrations identify requests from known AI chatbots based on their user agent and record them in Matomo.

In Matomo > AI Assistants > AI Chatbot Overview, the report helps you understand how AI systems use your website to generate responses, identify the pages frequently accessed, and monitor how your content is being consumed by AI tools.
view ai chatbots reports

By comparing reports, you can analyse both human visitors arriving through AI-generated recommendations and automated systems accessing your content. This helps you understand how AI influences content discovery and how these interactions contribute to overall traffic and engagement.