SurfacedBy maps AI traffic, referral clicks

This is less a vanity traffic post than an observability warning: if you lump all “AI traffic” together, you’ll miss the real differences between bots that fetch your site, bots that answer from index, and humans who click back from AI citations.

• –ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Manus expose clearer retrieval signals; Gemini often does not, and Copilot/Grok can look like normal browser traffic.
• –A single `User-Agent` rule is not enough for bot detection or blocking because some vendors preflight `robots.txt`, fan out across multiple IPs, or hide behind ordinary browser headers.
• –The useful metric is not just provider fetches but referral visits from people clicking AI citations, which is the traffic most sites actually care about.
• –SurfacedBy is using the post to reinforce its GEO/AI visibility platform, so the article works both as technical research and as product marketing.