5 Things AI-User Bot Data Can Tell You About Your AI Visibility

Many things are opaque when it comes to the AI visibility of your brand. How many times do LLMs mention or cite your business? How many people ask LLMs questions you might want to show up for? And how do these impressions influence actual buyers? While tools and transparency are evolving, there are a few methods you can use to triangulate on how good your AI visibility is. AI-user bot activity is one of them.

AI tools have two sources of knowledge: their training data, which provides stable, historical information, and a live search, used to get up-to-date information and answers. When AI tools do a live search, they send AI-user bots to your servers to read your web pages. Seeing which pages they visited can help you understand what information people and AI want about your brand.

To collect this data, you need to access and parse server log files. It will probably require a developer’s support, although tools like Profound are adding these integrations. My colleague Nico Brooks wrote a blog post about how to track AI-user bot hits if you’re using Cloudflare. 

Once you’ve got that data, how can you use it to optimize your marketing?

Compare what pages AI-user bots visit versus what humans visit

What are the top ten pages AI-user bots visit? What are the top ten pages humans visit? What are the top ten landing pages for organic traffic? I’m often surprised when I review this data—the lists are simply not the same. The trends I’ve seen across a couple of sites are that AI-user bots are interested in evergreen content (101-level content, or expanded definitions like our GA4 Engagement Metrics article) and timely content (things that have changed about the business recently). Your results may vary.

Evaluate content for pruning

Launching a new website is often a great time to remove old content you no longer want to maintain. Pruning content is also valuable when your business has evolved; old content reinforces an incorrect view of the topics on which the brand is authoritative, and undercuts AI tools’ understanding of your expertise. In the past, we’d use website visit data to inform this choice. Going forward, I wouldn’t prune content before understanding if AI-user bots are leveraging the content too.

Understand when content is starting to lose traction

Several studies have shown that AI tools give better visibility to more recent content, although that varies by industry and topic area. Looking at page hits over time, you can identify when well-visited content might be starting to slip. Content that’s important to your buyers should be updated frequently, and a decline like this can be an indicator that you need to take a deeper look.

Understand demand for your content by funnel stage

Different content on your website appeals to buyers who are in different stages of the buying journey. When people are figuring out their own needs, they want to figure out different ways a problem can be solved: rent vs. buy, build vs. buy, what features are needed? As they get closer to purchase, they research vendor comparisons, costs, and service options. 

Take a look at the content that AI-user bots are crawling. Which stage of the funnel does that content support? Does your crawled content cover all stages of the funnel, or leave some out? Is AI favoring your high-funnel content but not the low-funnel content? This points to opportunities to recraft content or build new pages.

Understand content that needs improvement

Using citation frequency data from tools like Profound, compare how often different pages are cited versus how often they’re crawled by the AI-user bots. A large gap in cited vs. crawled may mean the content on the page isn’t structured in a way that’s good for LLMs to cite. 

AI-user bot data is a fascinating look under the hood at how AI tools are leveraging the information on your website—how frequently and to what pages. Of course, more crawls don’t mean more mentions or more citations. But since those AI tools aren’t reporting mentions and citations themselves, it’s a reliable way to understand what they’re doing with your brand, and a great source for optimization ideas. 

What’s next? If your website uses Cloudflare, head to Nico’s blog to see how you can get the server logs and parse it into usable data. If you subscribe to Peec AI or Profound, enable the log file integrations. Or connect with us—we’d love to analyze this data for you as part of an AEO audit and roadmap.