AI Referral Traffic
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Usually small in number and unusually well-qualified, because they clicked after reading a recommendation.
Related terms
Answer Engine
An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are all answer engines. The old question was “do we rank?”; the new one is “are we the answer?”
AI Overviews
The written summary Google now places above its search results, assembled from several pages and citing a few of them. Appearing inside one can bring visitors; being left out of one can quietly cost you the clicks you used to get.
User-Agent
The name a browser or bot gives when it requests a page. It is how a server tells Googlebot from ChatGPT from a person, and how robots.txt rules are addressed to one and not another.
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing instructions that get reliable results from an AI — being specific, giving examples, saying what to avoid. Less mysterious than it sounds, and mostly the same skill as briefing a new colleague well.
AI Readiness
Whether a website can be reached, understood and quoted by AI assistants. It covers crawler access, structured data, clear headings, published contact details and speed — the unglamorous things that decide whether a model will name you.
ClaudeBot
Anthropic’s crawler, which reads public pages for Claude. Like the others it identifies itself and follows robots.txt.