What are AI Assistants in Matomo

Cloud On-Premise

AI-powered systems are changing how people discover and access content online. For example, visitors can arrive at your website after clicking a link recommended by an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude. Or, AI systems can directly analyse your website and retrieve content.

Matomo provides several AI-related reports that track different types of AI-driven activity. Some reports measure human visitors referred by AI assistants, while others measure AI agents and chatbots that access your website directly.

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

AI Assistants channel

AI assistants are AI-powered tools that answer questions and recommend content from across the web. Examples include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity.

Matomo identifies AI Assistant visits using referrer information. For example:

referrer domain: chatgpt.com

When a visitor arrives from a recognised AI assistant domain (by clicking a source link provided by AI), Matomo can attribute the resulting visit to the AI Assistant acquisition channel.

To view the report in Matomo, go to Acquisition > AI Assistants.
Matomo product screenshot showing the "AI Assistants" menu.

The AI Assistant acquisition channel measures visitors referred by AI assistants. It does not measure AI tools accessing your website directly. Depending on the detection method and available signals, those interactions will instead appear in the AI Agents or AI Chatbots reports.

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.

The AI Agent Overview report compares AI agent visits and human visitors to analyse the differences in website engagement.

To view the report in Matomo, go to AI Assistants > AI Agent Overview.

view ai agents overtime report

Because AI agents can render HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images, Matomo can track them when they execute the JavaScript tracker (matomo.js) or send tracking requests through the Matomo Tracking API (matomo.php).

Detection uses signals such as tracking requests, request headers, and User-Agent information that indicate the traffic originated from a recognised AI agent. For example:

Signature-Agent: "https://chatgpt.com"

AI Chatbots

AI Chatbots fetch website content (without full browser rendering) to generate responses for users. So, unlike human visitors, chatbots do not load pages in a browser, and usually request HTML only without executing JavaScript.

Since requests are sent directly from its servers to your website to retrieve page content, the standard Matomo tracking script cannot detect them.

Instead, Matomo detects AI chatbot activity through supported server-side integrations, including Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, WordPress, or a custom integration using the HTTP Tracking API.

After configuring the integration, view the report in Matomo by going to AI Assistants > AI Chatbot Overview.

view ai chatbots reports

Detection uses User-Agent strings included in incoming requests to identify recognised AI chatbots. For example:

User-Agent: ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

Limitations and considerations

AI assistant acquisition channel, AI agent, and AI chatbot detection relies on the signals available in each request.

Detection accuracy may vary between AI platforms and can change over time as providers update their infrastructure and identification methods.

When analysing AI assistant-related reports, consider the following factors:

  • AI assistant referrals can only be attributed when referrer information is available.
  • AI agents that do not execute the Matomo tracking code may not be identified as AI Agent visits.
  • Some AI systems may not provide sufficient signals for reliable identification.
  • Requests made by crawlers that collect content for indexing or model training are excluded from the AI Agent and AI Chatbot reports and are not reported separately in Matomo.

Matomo continually updates its detection methods to improve identification of supported AI assistants, agents, and chatbots.