Help & troubleshooting

Almost always a copy-paste slip. Re-copy the Cloud URL, API key and HMAC secret from the Connection tab with no leading or trailing spaces, and make sure the store domain you registered matches the site you're testing from. If it still fails, your host or a firewall may be blocking outbound HTTPS to api.botmetria.com — allow it.

This is the #1 cause, and it's almost always a page cache. A caching plugin (LiteSpeed, W3TC, WP Super Cache) or Cloudflare serves AI bots a cached page that never reaches Botmetria, so those visits go uncounted (WP Rocket is handled automatically by the plugin). Exclude the AI-bot user-agents from your cache: the plugin's Status page in WordPress detects your cache and gives a copy-paste user-agent list, and the Connection tab in your dashboard has the steps. Quick self-test: curl -A GPTBot -I https://your-store/ should not return cache-hit headers.

That's expected right after setup: the green handshake confirms your keys work, but the cards only fill once a real AI bot visits — which can take hours or days. To see it work now, visit your store as a bot: curl -A GPTBot https://your-store/, then refresh the dashboard. The visit shows as unverified because it isn't from an official bot IP — that's correct.

The plugin buffers events locally and ships them in the background. On a low-traffic site WP-Cron fires rarely, so the buffer drains slowly. Set up a real server cron for WordPress — or just open any wp-admin page to flush it. The plugin's Status page shows the last successful send and the current buffer size.

Every bot visit is checked against the official IP ranges or reverse DNS of OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, Anthropic and others, so "unverified" is a feature, not a bug — it flags scrapers that spoof a bot user-agent. If genuinely official bots show as unverified, a CDN or reverse proxy in front of your site is replacing the bot's IP with its own. The WordPress plugin reads the visitor IP from the server's REMOTE_ADDR, so restore the real IP at the web server (nginx real_ip, Apache mod_remoteip or your CDN's IP-restore module); the PHP and Node collectors also read X-Forwarded-For, and the Cloudflare Worker always sees the real IP.

The pixel (bm.js) counts people — AI bots don't run JavaScript, so the pixel can't see them. Bot visits are counted by the Cloudflare Worker. Confirm the Worker is deployed and its route runs on every request to your store. Unlike the plugin, the Worker sits in front of the cache, so it needs no cache-bypass rule.

Reports go out every Monday. Check your spam folder and confirm the report email address on your account. A store that hasn't sent a single event yet gets no report — finish the connection first; once data has arrived, even a quiet week produces a short report. Add reports@botmetria.com to your contacts so future reports land in your inbox.

The 0–100 score and the list of issues appear on screen within about a minute. If you also leave your email on the results page, we send a prioritized fix plan within 1–2 business days. A low score isn't something to hide — every check comes with a concrete fix. The most common score-killer in our MD/RO rating is missing or incomplete product markup (JSON-LD Product); a robots.txt that blocks GPTBot or PerplexityBot is rarer but hides your store from those assistants entirely.