Your website's visibility and influence within LLMs

For website owners in the age of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, you want to see what pages are being used and what questions your website content helps to answer.

When an LLM pulls information from your site to answer a user's query, it often doesn't result in a traditional web visit (i.e., a full page load with JavaScript execution) in your Google Analytics. The LLM acts as a messenger.

Some even claim without sharing detail evidence that LLM-driven visits are converting at much higher rates ( from 8 to 23 times). This touches on a critical area: attribution.

The thing is LLM vendor doesn't currently provide an API for this granular level of data to third-party website owners (perhaps for privacy reasons and competitive advantage?).

This "Dark Traffic" Problem prevents you from finding out:
What topics and resources your site is being sourced for
How many actual user conversations included your content
Which specific URLs ChatGPT is pulling in to answer questions

Since direct tracking is hard, what are the solutions given that the landscape is still developing, and new tools are emerging to help quantify this "dark traffic" and LLM influence?

Server Log File Analysis

Here a solution from what I gathered. The most reliable way to see when ChatGPT (and other LLMs) are accessing your content for answers is through server log file analysis.

LLMs often use specific "user-agents" when they browse your site to gather information for answers. For example, ChatGPT might use "ChatGPT-User".

Tools like Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer or custom scripts can help you sift through these logs by analyzing your server logs and filtering for these user-agents

Do note that not some web platform (like Shopify) or web hosting services, you might not have access to server log file.

Qualitative Feedback

If this is the case, think Qualitative Feedback. Consider adding questions to your conversion forms or customer surveys like "How did you first hear about us?" and include "AI/Chatbot" as an option.

To truly understand your influence in the AI era, you need to combine several approaches. I shared 2 approaches and they are few more. Proactive thinking about these challenges is crucial for staying ahead in the AI-driven discovery journey

Let meet and I can share more face to face.