ChecklistUpdated 2026-09-21
Before you report AI traffic to your team
Run these five checks before an AI traffic figure goes into a slide. Each one catches a way a crawler count gets presented as something bigger — unverified requests, a missing baseline, or a number from one step of the evidence ladder labelled with a word from another.
- Verified or claimed? Split the figure into requests that passed the provider's documented check, requests that failed it, and requests you could not check. Report the first. On our own site, 45% of checkable requests passed.
- Which step is it from? A request is "crawled". It is not "visible", "used" or "recommended". Label the number with the step it belongs to.
- Compared with what? Give last month's figure measured the same way. A number without a baseline is a number nobody can interpret.
- Which providers? Aggregates hide the one provider that matters to your buyers. Show the split.
- What does it not show? One sentence at the bottom: this counts fetches, not answers; it says nothing about whether our product was named or linked.
Why each item is on the list
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