Reading the dashboard

Open the AI traffic tab and pick the last 30 or 90 days. You see visits, crawler hits, orders, revenue and conversion by assistant, plus your top 10 products.

• Visits: a script under 1 KB, with no cookies, runs only when the visitor’s referrer or utm_source matches a known assistant. It sends one beacon with the assistant and the product ID only. To avoid counting one visit twice it saves a flag named citecart_hit in the visitor’s session storage (not a cookie, cleared when the tab closes). If you serve visitors in a consent jurisdiction, you may need to treat that flag as analytics storage.
• Crawler hits: known AI crawlers requesting product and shop pages that PHP serves. Bing and Google shopping crawlers are counted as Copilot and Gemini. They are crawler hits, not people.
• Orders: classified from WooCommerce’s own order attribution data. WooCommerce’s Origin column shows labels such as “AI: ChatGPT”.

Assistants tracked include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral and You. Daily totals are kept for 13 months. No IP address, user agent or user ID is stored.

Fix impact#

For products with an applied fix at least 7 days old, CiteCart compares AI visits and orders over equal windows (up to 30 days each side) before and after the first approved fix. This is correlation, not proof: other changes also move traffic.

Behind a CDN or proxy#

The beacon is rate-limited per visitor. If a CDN or reverse proxy hides the real IP, supply a trusted client IP:

add_filter( 'citecart_client_ip', function ( $ip ) {
	return isset( $_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'] )
		? sanitize_text_field( wp_unslash( $_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'] ) )
		: $ip;
} );

Add or change tracked assistants with the citecart_ai_sources filter.