Trace
Who arrived from an AI answer, which assistant sent them, and what they were reading. The only lens that connects a citation to a real visit.
Every other lens measures what engines say. Trace measures what happens next: somebody read an answer and came to your site. It requires a small tag on your site, and it is the only place the platform can connect a citation to a person.
What you'll learn
- What Trace counts, split by how provable each figure is
- Why bound visits are the only proof an answer sent someone
- What you need to install
Three cards
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| AI referrals | What arrived, split into human and crawler, and how much of it is provable |
| Which assistants sent them | The assistant per visit, with unnamed ones listed as unattributed |
| What they were reading | The prompts those visits map to, and which surfaces |
Bound visits are the strong claim
This lens turns on one distinction, and it is worth getting right before you quote it:
- An arrival means the tag reported a visit that looks like it came from an AI assistant. Real, useful, and reported.
- A bound visit means that visit has been joined to a citation the platform actually counted. That is the figure that proves an answer sent someone, rather than that someone arrived.
The bound figure gets its own row and its own sentence. It is never folded into the total, because "an assistant sent someone here" and "an assistant sent someone here from an answer we can show you" are different claims.
A visit with no AI source recorded is ordinary web traffic, not an AI referral. It is not dropped, because the visits are real and the total would be wrong without them, and it is not guessed at either. It is listed as unattributed.
Crawlers are counted separately
Crawler visits are not people. They are still worth seeing: an AI crawler fetching your pages is the mechanism behind a future citation, and a crawler that stops coming is an early warning. They are counted on their own row rather than mixed into human traffic.
What you have to install
Trace needs a tag on your site, which means a key and a snippet, or a Cloudflare worker if you would rather not touch the page. Setup is configuration rather than analysis, so it lives on its own page rather than in the panel beside your conversation. See install Trace.
Which plans include it
Trace is part of the Intelligence layer: Scale and Enterprise. See plans and limits.
Try this in Outercite
Open Trace and compare the arrivals figure with the bound figure. The gap between them is the part of your AI traffic the platform cannot yet tie to an answer, and closing it is usually a matter of tracking the prompts those visitors were actually asking.
Related
Install Trace
The key, the snippet, and the worker option.
Sources
Which pages the answers leaned on in the first place.
Proof
The sentence a visitor probably read before they arrived.
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