How can I track AI search referrals?

Filter your access logs by Referer domain (for example chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai), group by landing page, and monitor daily trend with unique IP counts.

Question

How to track AI search referrals

Referrals and crawlers are different. Crawlers show discovery behavior, while referrals show user visits coming back from AI products.

Daily metrics to keep

Requests and unique IP from AI referrer domains.
Top landing pages that received AI referrals.
Status code mix on those landings.

Minimal command pattern

jq -r '((.request.headers.Referer[0] // ""))' /var/lib/caddy/logs/llmsfile-access.log | grep -Ei 'chatgpt|perplexity|copilot|gemini'
jq -r 'select(((.request.headers.Referer[0] // "") | test("chatgpt|perplexity|copilot|gemini"; "i"))) | [.request.uri, .status] | @tsv' /var/lib/caddy/logs/llmsfile-access.log

Operational note

Track this daily. Early AI referral traffic is usually small, so trend direction matters more than single-day spikes.