Botmetria
Shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants what to buy — and classic analytics records those visitors as “direct”, so store owners never see them. Botmetria makes this traffic visible and controllable:
- AI bot analytics — every visit by a known AI crawler or assistant agent (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and more) is detected and counted, with the page, product and response time.
- Impostor detection — a User-Agent string is trusted only after the visitor IP is verified against the bot vendor’s published IP ranges. Scrapers pretending to be GPTBot show up as impostors, not as AI traffic.
- AI referral attribution — human visitors arriving from AI assistants (chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, …) are tracked to first-touch source, including WooCommerce orders and revenue.
- AI firewall — decide who gets in: Showcase (welcome all known AI bots), Allowlist (block everything except chosen vendors), Server relief (temporary 503 + Retry-After for all AI bots), or a per-bot Custom matrix. Classic search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot, …) are never blocked — a code-level safety.
- Machine readability — valid JSON-LD Product markup, an
llms.txtsummary of your store, and a robots.txt helper, so AI agents can actually read your prices, availability and delivery terms. - Weekly e-mail report — AI visits, verified vs. impostor bots, top products by bot attention, AI-sourced orders, and plain-language recommendations.
The hot path is a single User-Agent substring scan per request (a few milliseconds, no DB writes, no HTTP calls); events are buffered locally and shipped in batches in the background. If the cloud is unreachable, your store is never slowed down or blocked — the plugin fails open.
External service (required reading)
This plugin is a connector for Botmetria, an analytics service. Once you connect your store (by entering the Cloud URL, API key and HMAC secret from your Botmetria account), the plugin communicates with the Botmetria cloud — by default https://api.botmetria.com, or a server you configure:
- Sent: AI-bot visit events (bot name, bot user-agent, bot IP address, requested URL path, page type, product ID, HTTP status, response time), AI-referral events (source such as “chatgpt”, landing URL, an anonymized session hash, and for conversions the WooCommerce order ID, order total and currency; orders with no AI interaction are reported the same way with source “none” — the baseline needed to compute the AI share of revenue — and a refund, cancellation or failed payment sends a negative amount correcting the revenue previously reported for that order), results of one-click fix actions you triggered from your dashboard (action id, status and a short message), aggregate page-serve counters (how many pages the server served per time window — numbers only), and a product-feed quality summary after each feed rebuild (how many products lack a price, image or GTIN/SKU, with up to 10 SKU identifiers per gap as examples). Events are signed with your HMAC secret.
- Received: the up-to-date AI bot detect list, official bot vendor IP ranges for impostor detection, your plugin configuration (including firewall settings if you manage them from the Botmetria dashboard), one-click fix commands you approved in your dashboard (the plugin only executes actions from the fixed list built into its code — the cloud cannot send code or arbitrary instructions), and question/answer pairs you approved for FAQPage markup.
- Not sent: no shopper names, e-mails, addresses or payment data; no admin credentials. The session hash cannot be reversed into a person. Bot IP addresses (not human visitors’ IPs) are transmitted for verification purposes.
Nothing is transmitted until you enter your API credentials. Terms of use: https://botmetria.com/terms.html. Privacy policy: https://botmetria.com/privacy.html. The service is operated by Botmetria (https://botmetria.com).
The AI firewall, JSON-LD and llms.txt features also work without a cloud account, using the detect list and IP ranges bundled with the plugin.