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·6 min read

Crawl-to-referral is the only AI SEO number that is not a guess

Models fetch pages. Sometimes those pages later send you a person. The ratio is observable. Rank-tracking for ChatGPT is not.

AI SEOCrawlers

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Cited is not the same as clicked. You can measure both.

A cottage industry now sells “AI visibility scores.” Most of them sample a chatbot, screenshot an answer, and charge you for the theatre. Vector 5 does not score your brand inside a model. It counts two things that already happened on your site: which paths GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and peers fetched, and which of those paths later referred a human_via_ai visitor.

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A citation is a fetch plus a later click. One without the other is a different story.

How to read the table

  • /docs/middleware — high crawl, high referral: the page is structured so a model can quote it and a person can act.
  • /blog/cookieless — crawled, some referral: useful, not yet a destination.
  • /pricing — crawled constantly, almost no humans: the model knows the page; people do not follow the citation. Rewrite the first paragraph, not the ads.

The middleware records the fetch. The tracker records the later person. Join them on path. That is the whole method. No panel. No invented impressions inside ChatGPT.

If you cannot observe the crawl and the click on your own origin, you are buying a story about someone else’s screenshot.