Understanding AI Traffic in Matomo: How Can We Isolate Real AI-Driven Human Visits?

General questions
1

I’m currently trying to better understand how to identify and filter AI-related traffic in Matomo — ideally separating it from normal traffic and, if possible, isolating mostly real human clicks coming from AI platforms.

So far, I’ve experimented with the following segment approaches:

  • Referrer Name contains “ChatGPT”, “Perplexity”, etc.

  • AI Agent Name contains “ChatGPT”, “Perplexity”, etc.

Both methods produce very different results and interpretations, and I’m still trying to understand:

  • Which approach is more reliable?

  • What exactly is included in “AI Agent” traffic?

  • How much of this traffic is likely bots/crawlers versus actual human visits originating from AI tools?

My goal is to build a cleaner and more meaningful AI traffic analysis setup in Matomo — ideally focused on real user interactions rather than automated AI agents.

I’d love to hear how others are approaching this problem and whether anyone has found effective ways to identify genuine human AI referral traffic.

1 Like
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Interesting topic. I’ve noticed similar inconsistencies when comparing referrer-based segments with AI agent identification.

From what I’ve observed, referrer filtering seems more useful for identifying potential human visits coming from AI platforms, while AI agent data often appears to include a broader mix of crawlers, automated requests, and tool-based traffic. That difference alone can make the numbers look very different.

One thing that helped me a bit was comparing engagement signals afterward — things like time on page, navigation behavior, and repeat interactions. The more natural the session behavior looked, the more likely it seemed to be genuine user traffic rather than automated activity.

Still feels like this area is evolving quickly though, especially with how differently AI tools handle referrals and browsing behavior.

3

Maybe there is a misunderstood. Matomo don’t detect Bots with AI.

A bot (bot, crawler, spider, …) is a bot. Also a AI bot is a bot. A bot is not a human.

The (newer) Matomo have a category “AI …”. This don’t displays AI bots, but human “comes from” AI Agents like ChatGPT.

You must distinguish between Referrer and Browser Agent. Both detect other:

Referrer: “comes from …”
Browser Agent: Bot or not Bot or undetectable Bot.

Matomo used the Device Detector for Browser Agent Bot detecting:
: https://devicedetector.lw1.at/

You can use the Plugin TrackSpamPrevention. But it is today impossible to detect undectable bots. The undectable bots are very increasing.