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ChatGPT bots on your website: who they are and how to see them

August 2, 2026

If you run an online store, ChatGPT's bots are almost certainly already crawling it — you just can't see it. On one Moldovan sporting-goods store we counted over 600,000 requests from a single AI vendor in about three weeks (13 Jul – 1 Aug 2026) — roughly 34,000 a day. Google Analytics showed zero.

Which OpenAI bots actually visit

OpenAI runs three distinct bots, each with a different job:

• GPTBot — crawls pages to train models. It's the one that usually generates the bulk of the load, visiting broadly and repeatedly.
• OAI-SearchBot — indexes sites for search inside ChatGPT. If you want ChatGPT to recommend your store, this is not one you want to block.
• ChatGPT-User — fires the moment a real person asks ChatGPT about your product right now, and the model opens the page to answer. This is the most valuable of the three: there's an actual shopper behind it.

Beyond OpenAI, stores also see ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Meta's meta-externalagent, Applebot and Amazonbot. The mix varies a lot store by store — one is dominated by OpenAI, another by Perplexity or Amazon; our first measured numbers for Moldova are in the AI Traffic Index (issue #1, summer 2026).

Why Google Analytics shows nothing

GA counts visitors via JavaScript running in a browser. Bots don't execute JavaScript — they just download the HTML. So as far as the counter is concerned, they don't exist: a million hits a month, zero in the reports. The only place bots actually show up is server logs or a system that measures traffic server-side.

How to tell a real bot from a spoofed one

A User-Agent string is trivial to fake — any scraper can claim to be "GPTBot". Real bots are verified by IP: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity all publish official IP ranges for their crawlers. A request claiming "GPTBot" from an IP outside that range is a spoofer, and it shouldn't be counted as AI traffic. Botmetria's analytics does this verification automatically and flags spoofed hits separately.

What a store owner should actually do

1. Measure first. Without numbers, any decision here is a guess. Botmetria's analytics — free for everyone during the open beta — shows exactly which bots visit, which pages, and how often.
2. Decide who gets in. Bots that bring shoppers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot) are worth letting through. Ones that only load your server can be blocked right in the Botmetria plugin — search engine crawlers like Google and Bing are never touched.
3. Check that bots can actually read your pages. Heavy client-side rendering, missing structured data, and an overly restrictive robots.txt make a store effectively invisible to AI. The median AI-readiness score across 63 stores in Moldova and Romania is just 38 out of 100.

AI traffic isn't a log anomaly — it's a new channel shoppers use to find stores. See it first, then decide what to do with it.