ANSWERS
What is AI agent traffic?
AI agent traffic is the visits an AI system makes to your site instead of a person: crawlers collecting pages to train models or build an AI search index, fetchers that read a page because someone asked an assistant about it, and agent browsers that browse and shop on a person's behalf.
The four kinds
| Kind | What it does | Examples | Runs JavaScript? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training crawler | Collects pages for model training | GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot | No |
| Search indexer | Builds an AI search index | OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot | No |
| User fetcher | Reads a page because a person asked about it | ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User | No |
| Agent browser | Drives a real browser for a person, and may check out | OpenAI Operator, Meta's Muse | Yes |
The first three usually name themselves in their user agent. Agent browsers may not: Meta's Muse, for example, has no published fingerprint.
Why it matters to a store
- It is how AI answers learn about your products. A crawler that can't read your prices or stock can't recommend them accurately.
- Some of it buys. Agent browsers and AI platforms' own checkouts now place real orders, and an order placed in an agent checkout never loads your storefront, so browser analytics can't record it.
- Your analytics mis-files it. Tools like Google Analytics filter known bots out and never see crawlers that don't run JavaScript, while an agent browser that does run it gets counted as a person.
How to see it
Server logs or your CDN show the crawlers that name themselves. Seeing agent browsers takes behavioural detection, and connecting any of it to orders takes the order data. Tactical does the detection on Shopify, WooCommerce and custom sites, and the order side on WooCommerce; how detection works.
See the agents on your own store.
Start free