How tracking works
Visibility Kit records the real visits that AI tools send to your site.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini a question and clicks a link in the answer, they land on your site as a normal visitor. Visibility Kit records that visit and notes which AI tool sent it. It is the same idea as organic search traffic, except the visitor came from an AI tool instead of a search engine.
The signal we use is the referrer. When a browser follows a link from one site to another, it tells the destination where it came from. A visit that arrives from chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, or perplexity.ai is a person who clicked through from that tool. We read that referrer, match it to the tool, and log the session.
How it gets captured
The plugin loads a small script (vk-core.js) on your site. It runs in the visitor's browser, reads the referrer, classifies it into an AI source, and records the visit. Because the script runs in the browser after the page has loaded, it works the same way whether your pages are served fresh or from a cache. The full list of tools we identify is on the AI referrers page.
What we record
Each AI-sourced visit captures the tool that sent it, the page the visitor landed on, basic browser and device context, a timestamp, and an anonymized visitor id so that later pageviews stay tied to the same session. When that visitor moves to other pages, those pageviews stay attributed to the same AI-sourced session, the same way analytics keeps an organic search session together.
We do not capture the question the person asked the AI. The tools do not pass the prompt along in the referrer, so it stays on their side. We also do not see which specific answer cited you, and we do not record personal information about the visitor.
What changed in 2026
Earlier versions of Visibility Kit did two more things: they detected AI crawler bots on your server, and they pulled bot data from Cloudflare. We removed both in the middle of 2026. The full reasoning is on the AI crawlers and Cloudflare pages. The short version is that crawler counts did not change what anyone did, while a real person arriving from an AI answer does, so tracking now focuses on that person.
If you're not on WordPress
The plugin is the easy path on WordPress, but the signal it reads is not WordPress-specific. If you run Google Analytics, the same AI visits are already in your data, and the Google Analytics page covers how to pull a clean count out of it. If you want first-party data and you are comfortable with a little code, you can also read the referrer yourself on the server, in a Cloudflare Worker or your site's middleware, with a few lines that log where each visit came from. The list of AI domains you match against is the same either way.