Crawler tracking shows visits from some AI bots (like Meta or Mistral) but not others (like ChatGPT or Perplexity), even though I know those engines have visited. Is tracking broken?

Updated June 30, 2026 · Reviewed by [email protected]

Not necessarily. Crawler tracking detects AI bots by matching known user-agent strings (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and others), so if a request carries one of those user agents, it shows up. If an engine fetched your content without an identifiable bot user agent in that request, or routed it through a different mechanism than a direct crawl, it won't appear as a tracked visit even though the content still got read.

A gap in the dashboard for one engine usually means that engine hasn't sent an identifiable crawl request to your site recently, not that tracking is broken for it specifically.

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