How many visitors do AI engines actually send a small site? 10 referrals in 70 days, every one timestamped — 4 of them in the last 29 hours

The whole series, timestamped

Method: the detector is a client-side event (`ai_referral_detected`) that fires when a session's referrer or utm tag matches a known AI engine; the series above is its bot-, probe- and scanner-excluded lifetime read. The Google column is the standard Search Console 28-day page pull (2026-07-22 to 08-19) for the same URL — a different window than the 70-day series, stated per page, not per fire date. The full machine-readable cut is saved alongside this post.

What the series actually says

• The rate is accelerating, from a low base. The first six fires took 34 days (2026-07-14 to 08-17). The last four arrived in 28.6 hours (08-20 02:13 to 08-21 06:50) — and hit three different kinds of page: a news post, a comparison page, and an agency landing page, the last two for the first time ever.
• AI engines send visitors to pages Google buries. Fires 7 and 9 landed on a comparison page Google shows at average position 75.6 with 0 clicks on 126 impressions in 28 days; fire 10 landed on a landing page at position 51.1 with 0 clicks. Across all 8 distinct landing pages in the series, Google sent 6 clicks in the trailing 28 days — 5 of them to a single post.
• The instrument provably undercounts. Two more ChatGPT arrivals (2026-08-06 and 08-20) carried an AI marker on the pageview but lost the detector event to client-side batching before we shipped a send-on-arrival fix on 08-20 — counting those, the lifetime basis is 12. Engines that strip referrers and send no utm tag are invisible to both bases; a zero from such an engine means nothing.

What cuts against the clean story

None of the ten referred sessions has started a check on this site — 0 of 10, including on any later visit by the same person. AI engines are sending real people; the pages they land on are not yet converting them, and we publish that number beside the traffic number because they are the same story. If you want to know whether ChatGPT or Perplexity cites your business at all — the step before any of this traffic exists — a free check reads that directly.

Limits

One small site, 70 days, n=10 — a case series, not a benchmark. The detector is client-side, so it undercounts (two named lost rows above) and cannot see engines that send no referrer or marker. The Google comparison uses a 28-day window against a 70-day series because that is what the Search Console API discloses; per-page positions are averages across all queries. We will keep publishing this series as it grows, including if the rate falls back to its July pace.