The site looked dead. Thirty days of analytics, and the traffic arriving from AI came to two visits — one from ChatGPT, one from DuckDuckGo. Two. From a dashboard like that you would conclude that no AI has ever noticed the site exists.
That conclusion is wrong by about ten thousand.
Over the same thirty days, AI crawlers requested pages from that site 13,306 times, and 10,202 of those requests were for pages with actual writing on them. The two instruments are not contradicting each other. They are answering different questions, and almost everybody is only asking the first one.
The site is davaonline.net, a WordPress site running a plugin that does the opposite of normal analytics. It ignores human visitors completely and records only AI crawlers: which ones arrived, what they fetched, and whether the thing they fetched was a page or just a file.
Here is the whole month.
| Thirty days | Count |
|---|---|
| AI crawler requests | 13,306 |
| Requests that hit a content page | 10,202 |
| Requests made to answer a live question | 1,902 |
| People who arrived by following an AI answer | 2 |
Read it downward. The story is in the descent.
The gap between the first two numbers — 3,104 requests — is not rounding error. It is robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and a tail of files that are not your writing. A crawler that fetches robots.txt and leaves has visited your site and read nothing. Counting that as AI is reading me is counting a knock at the door as a conversation.
Which is why the instrument sorts every request by purpose instead of reporting one number:
| Purpose | Requests (vs previous 30 days) |
|---|---|
| Training — collected to train a model | 9,514 (+1,175%) |
| AI search — indexed for an answer engine | 1,890 (+432%) |
| User fetch — retrieved to answer a live question | 1,902 (+3,558%) |
These are not interchangeable. Training collection is a bet on the future: your words may end up inside a model that ships next year, or they may not. Search indexing is a bet on retrieval: you become findable inside somebody else's answer engine. User fetch is neither a bet nor a future. It means a person asked a question a few seconds ago, and a machine went to your page to answer them.
1,902 times in thirty days, this site was contacted by a crawler that retrieves on behalf of somebody asking a question right now. Two people arrived.
One came from ChatGPT. One came from DuckDuckGo. That is the complete AI referral traffic for the month.
A note on the arithmetic: the 1,902 and the 10,202 slice the same pile of requests in different directions — one by what the crawler is for, the other by what it asked for. Neither is contained in the other, and the 1,902 includes some share of robots.txt fetches rather than pages. Read at its most conservative, the ratio does not soften.
This gap is not a funnel to optimize. It is the shape of the thing. The page was retrieved, read, and used as the source of an answer that appeared somewhere else entirely. The answer was delivered. The visit never happened. Meanwhile those fetches grew 3,558% over the previous thirty days — two arrivals is what that growth looks like from the traffic side.
A conventional analytics dashboard reports this month as though almost nothing occurred. It is not wrong about visits. It is answering a question that has quietly stopped being the important one.
Before any of that means anything, here is what these numbers are not.
None of those caveats move the conclusion, because they all push the same direction. Correcting for every one of them would make the reading number larger and leave the arrival number roughly where it is.
The instrument is a WordPress plugin called AILYS Lens, and it is free. I build it, which you should factor into everything above. It is also built so that measuring costs you nothing else: every calculation runs on your own server, nothing is transmitted anywhere, and human visitors are never recorded — only AI crawlers are. Requests that are not crawlers pass through in under a millisecond, and no CSS or JavaScript is loaded on your front end.
Install it, leave it alone for a week, and you will know whether anything is reading you. It is a question with a factual answer, and until recently there was no instrument that would give it to you.
The uncomfortable part of this month is not the two. It is that a site can be read ten thousand times and still produce a dashboard that looks like failure — and that its owner has no ordinary way to tell the difference between being ignored and being read in silence. That is a strange position to publish from. It seems worth knowing which one you are in.
AILYS Lens is free permanently. That is a design commitment rather than a pricing stage — every feature runs locally on your server, so there is nothing for a paid tier to unlock.
The diagnostic service alongside it, AILYS Doctor, is a different thing. Lens tells you what happened; Doctor tells you why, and what to change. It has been free during its data-collection period. On September 15, 2026 it becomes a paid subscription: $19 per month, or $10 per month for anyone who subscribes before the end of 2026.