Show HN: See when ChatGPT or Perplexity sends a visitor to your site

A new free tool called AI Referral Notifier runs as a Cloudflare Worker to send push notifications when AI assistants like ChatGPT or Perplexity send a visitor to a site, or when AI crawlers fetch pages. The tool detects referrals and crawlers at the edge without slowing the site, making visible which AI engines drive traffic.

Get a push notification the moment an AI assistant sends you a real visitor: a person who clicked through from a ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, or Grok answer. A visitor an AI actively pointed at you is rare and high-value, and this tells you the instant it happens. It can also alert on AI crawlers fetching your pages to train on them, index them, or answer a user live . That is the far higher-volume signal: a busy site sees thousands of crawler hits a day. One setting, ALERT ON , chooses which signals fire referrals , crawlers , or both ; it defaults to referrals because crawlers are so much noisier. Turn them on with ALERT ON=crawlers or both .It runs as a single Cloudflare Worker in front of your site, inspects each request at the edge, fires a notification to your phone, and passes the request straight through to your origin. No tracking script, no database, no change to your pages. Detection and notifications run off the response path, so your site is never slowed down. Most "AI bot" tools are about blocking . But the AI crawl is not the threat, it is the tell: it is the clearest early signal of who is reading you and why. The interesting question is not "how do I keep AI bots out," it is "which AI engines actually touch me, and which ones send me people." This tool makes that visible in real time, for free. | This tool free tells you | It cannot tell you | |---|---| | A human landed on your site from an AI assistant, and on which page | Whether the AI actually cited you in an answer | | An AI crawler hit your site, which vendor, and its purpose train / index / answer live | Which prompts you show up for, and which you are missing | | The visitor's country, real-time, at your edge | Whether the AI recommended a competitor instead of you | | Which signals to be alerted on referrals, crawlers, or both | Whether that visibility turned into signups or revenue | The right-hand column is the actual job of AI visibility, and it needs measurement across the assistants, not just your own logs. This tool is the free first look at what reaches your edge. You need a site that is already on Cloudflare its traffic is proxied by Cloudflare, the orange cloud in your DNS . First, pick a notification channel. The zero-account option is ntfy https://ntfy.sh : install the ntfy app on your phone, tap Subscribe to topic , and enter a long, hard-to-guess topic name treat it like a password, for example ai-alerts-9f3k2p-mysite . That topic name is all you need. Prefer Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, or Pushover? See Notification channels notification-channels . Then get the Worker deployed one of three ways: - fork this repo and Cloudflare builds it straight from your fork. No terminal, no copy-paste. Deploy from GitHub option-a-deploy-from-github-no-terminal - copy one file into the Worker editor. No terminal. Paste into the dashboard option-b-paste-into-the-dashboard-no-terminal - Command line option-c-command-line-wrangler git + wrangler , the most reliable path for developers. After the first two, do the one-time Configure the Worker configure-the-worker-after-option-a-or-b step. Fork this repo, then let Cloudflare import your fork and deploy it. Forking is what makes this reliable: Cloudflare deploys straight from a repo you already own, so there is no create-repo step to fail, and every later change you make auto-deploys. Fork this repository to your own GitHub account the Fork button, top right of the repo page .- In the Cloudflare dashboard https://dash.cloudflare.com , open Workers & Pages and click Create application . - Click Continue with GitHub and authorize the Cloudflare GitHub app to access your fork when prompted. - Select your fork from the repository list and click Next . - Accept the defaults and click Deploy . Cloudflare reads wrangler.toml , so ALERT ON referrals and CRAWLER THROTTLE SECONDS are already filled in and the deploy command is npx wrangler deploy . You do not need to open Advanced settings - ignore the non-production-branch build command, the build token, and any "token is missing permissions" notice. None of it matters here. - Now do Configure the Worker configure-the-worker-after-option-a-or-b : this deploy runs, but it will not alert anyone until you add a notification channel and a route. Fallback: Clone a public repository via Git URL. On Ship something new you can instead click Clone a public repository via Git URL and paste https://github.com/surfacedby/ai-traffic-alerts-for-cloudflare.git . This asks Cloudflare to create a fresh copy of the repo in your account, which can return HTTP 400 at the Deploy step before any build runs if the Cloudflare GitHub App lacks permission to create a repo it is installed with "Only select repositories" or a repo of that name already exists. Forking first, as above, avoids this. Create the Worker. In the Cloudflare dashboard https://dash.cloudflare.com , go to Compute Workers - Workers & Pages - Create - Start with Hello World - Get started . Give it a name like ai-traffic-alerts and create it. Paste the code. Click Edit code the </ button . Select all of the sample code and delete it, then paste the entire contents of open the link, select all, copy . Click src/worker.js Deploy .- Now do Configure the Worker configure-the-worker-after-option-a-or-b . The tool does not auto-pick where alerts go - it cannot know your phone or chat - so setting one notification channel is the single required step. Without it the Worker runs but stays silent and logs "no notification channel is configured" . You do this in the Worker's own Settings after deploy; you do not need the wizard's Advanced settings. Notification channel required . Variables and Secrets - Add your channel values and set the Type to Secret not Text for every one of them: NTFY TOPIC for ntfy, and likewise the Telegram, WhatsApp, Pushover, Discord, and generic-webhook values see Notification channels notification-channels for exact names . On the Deploy-from-GitHub path this is not optional for any of them: a Git-connected Worker rebuilds from wrangler.toml on every deploy and treats its vars as the complete set, so any plaintext dashboard variable is silently wiped on the next build - the Worker then still detects traffic and sends nothing, while Settings still shows the now-empty variable. Secrets are stored separately and survive builds. Set as many channels as you want - it alerts on all of them. What to alert on. Add ALERT ON set to referrals , crawlers , or both . It defaults to the rare, high-value signal, and it needs no KV , so you can even skip this. Turn on the noisy crawler signal only if you want it. referrals Put it in front of your site. Domains & Routes - Add - Route , pattern yourdomain.com/ , your zone. Choose Route , not Custom domain : a route runs the Worker on your existing site and passes traffic through to it. Only if you set Create a KV namespace under ALERT ON to crawlers or both throttle crawlers. Storage & Databases - KV - Create a namespace , name it RADAR KV , then bind it in the Worker under Settings - Bindings - Add binding - KV namespace with the Variable name RADAR KV . It dedupes crawler alerts to one per vendor per purpose per hour. referrals mode never touches KV. That is it. See Test that it works test-that-it-works to confirm. The most reliable path if you are comfortable in a terminal: it deploys directly to your account, with no GitHub-App repo-creation step that can fail. You need Node and npx . git clone https://github.com/surfacedby/ai-traffic-alerts-for-cloudflare cd ai-traffic-alerts-for-cloudflare npm install - Set your channel, route, and what to alert on in wrangler.toml : routes = { pattern = "yourdomain.com/ ", zone name = "yourdomain.com" } vars ALERT ON = "referrals" referrals | crawlers | both default referrals NTFY TOPIC = "your-long-secret-topic" - Only if you alert on crawlers create the throttle KV and paste the returned id into the kv namespaces block in wrangler.toml . In referrals mode you can skip this: npx wrangler kv namespace create RADAR KV - Deploy: npx wrangler deploy Run npm test to exercise the detection logic, and npx wrangler tail to watch live logs. Set any one or several . The Worker sends to every channel you configure. Each has a step-by-step guide below the table. | Channel | What to set | Guide | |---|---|---| ntfy | NTFY TOPIC and optional NTFY SERVER | | Telegram TELEGRAM BOT TOKEN , TELEGRAM CHAT ID Telegram setup telegram-setup-2-minutes WHATSAPP PHONE , WHATSAPP APIKEY WhatsApp setup whatsapp-setup-2-minutes - free personal alerts via CallMeBot Discord DISCORD WEBHOOK URL Discord setup discord-setup-1-minute Pushover PUSHOVER TOKEN , PUSHOVER USER Pushover setup pushover-setup-2-minutes Anything else GENERIC WEBHOOK URL Generic webhook generic-webhook-slack-zapier-your-own-api-1-minute - Slack, Zapier, your APIEvery channel is fire-and-forget with a 10-second timeout and checks the response, so one slow or misconfigured channel can neither delay the others nor break the request being served. Failures are logged with the channel name and HTTP status so you can see exactly what went wrong. Where to put the values: NTFY TOPIC and every channel token are Secrets , never plaintext. NTFY TOPIC behaves like a password anyone who knows the topic can read your alerts , and this repo is public, so it must never live in wrangler.toml . In the dashboard , open the Worker's Settings - Variables and Secrets - Add and choose Type: Secret . On the command line , use npx wrangler secret put NAME . Only non-sensitive settings ALERT ON , CRAWLER THROTTLE SECONDS , and the optional SITE DOMAIN / NTFY SERVER belong in wrangler.toml . On a Git-connected Builds Worker, a plaintext variable added only in the dashboard is wiped on the next build; a Secret is not. - Install the ntfy app iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/ntfy/id1625396347 / Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.heckel.ntfy , or open ntfy.sh https://ntfy.sh in a browser. - Tap Subscribe to topic and enter a long, hard-to-guess name anyone who knows the topic can see your alerts, so treat it like a password, for example ai-alerts-9f3k2p-mysite . - Set NTFY TOPIC to that exact name. Self-hosting ntfy? Also set NTFY SERVER defaults to https://ntfy.sh . ntfy.sh free-tier quota. The free ntfy.sh server caps how many messages you can publish per day, and that limit is per publishing IP. The Worker publishes from Cloudflare's shared egress IPs, so the quota can be reached faster than expected, especially with heavy testing or with ALERT ON set to crawlers or both thousands of hits a day will exhaust it quickly . Free ntfy is fine for the rare referrals signal; for crawler mode or any real volume, use a per-account channel Telegram, Discord, or Pushover , or self-host ntfy and point NTFY SERVER at it. When the quota is hit, publishing returns HTTP 429 see Troubleshooting troubleshooting and resets daily. - In Telegram, message @BotFather https://t.me/BotFather , send /newbot , and follow the prompts. It gives you a bot token like 123456:ABC-DEF... - that is TELEGRAM BOT TOKEN . - Open a chat with your new bot and send it any message bots cannot message you until you message them first . - Get your chat id : open https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR TOKEN /getUpdates in a browser paste your token in . Find "chat":{"id":...} in the JSON - that number is TELEGRAM CHAT ID . - Set both as secrets. This uses CallMeBot https://www.callmebot.com , a free relay that messages your own number it is personal-use only, which is exactly right for alerts to yourself . - Save the CallMeBot number +34 644 91 96 80 to your phone contacts. - From WhatsApp, send it exactly: I allow callmebot to send me messages . Within a minute it replies with your API key . - Set WHATSAPP PHONE to your number with country code for example +15551234567 and WHATSAPP APIKEY to the key it sent. Sending to customers not yourself is a different problem: it needs Meta's WhatsApp Cloud API with a pre-approved message template, because an alert is a business-initiated message. For that, point GENERIC WEBHOOK URL below at your Cloud API relay instead. - In your Discord server, open Server Settings - Integrations - Webhooks - New Webhook or a channel's Edit Channel - Integrations - Webhooks . - Choose the channel that should receive alerts, then click Copy Webhook URL . - Set DISCORD WEBHOOK URL to that URL. - Create an account at pushover.net https://pushover.net and install the Pushover app on your phone one-time purchase after a trial . - Your User Key is on the dashboard home - that is PUSHOVER USER . - Create an application token at pushover.net/apps/build https://pushover.net/apps/build name it "AI traffic alerts" - the API Token is PUSHOVER TOKEN . - Set both as secrets. Set GENERIC WEBHOOK URL to any endpoint and the Worker POSTs the event as JSON. The payload carries a ready-to-display text field plus structured fields type , vendor , purpose or referrer host , url , site , country , for example: { "text": " ai-traffic-alerts A person arrived from ChatGPT and landed on mysite.com/pricing.", "type": "referral", "vendor": "ChatGPT", "referrer host": "chatgpt.com", "url": "https://mysite.com/pricing", "site": "mysite.com", "country": "US" } Slack: create an Incoming Webhook https://api.slack.com/messaging/webhooks and use its URL. Slack renders the top-level text field, so it works with no adapter. Zapier / Make: use a "Catch Hook" trigger and branch on the structured fields. Your own API / database / CRM: consume the JSON directly. ALERT ON decides which signals fire: the default - only humans an AI sent you. The rare, high-value signal. Crawler detection is skipped entirely, so you need no referrals RADAR KV namespace and no throttling.- only AI crawler hits. Useful if you care about training/indexing coverage. crawlers - both signals. both Empty or unrecognized values fall back to referrals . If you alert on crawlers, they can hit you a lot, so they are throttled to one alert per vendor per purpose per hour ; human AI-referrals are never throttled, because a real person the AI sent you is the signal you always want. Change the window with CRAWLER THROTTLE SECONDS set 0 to alert on every single crawl, useful while testing . Throttling uses the optional RADAR KV namespace; without it the Worker still runs and simply does not dedupe. None of this applies in referrals mode. Simulate a human from ChatGPT: open https://yourdomain.com/?utm source=chatgpt.com in a browser. You should get an "AI sent you a visitor" alert within a few seconds. Works in referrals and both modes. Simulate a crawler: curl -A "GPTBot" https://yourdomain.com/ . You should get an "AI crawler" alert once per hour per vendor unless you set CRAWLER THROTTLE SECONDS=0 . Only fires when ALERT ON is crawlers or both . The alert names the site the visitor actually hit the request Host . If you test against the Worker's own .workers.dev URL instead of a routed domain, the alert will honestly read ...workers.dev ; on your real route it shows your real domain. To pin a fixed label regardless handy while testing , set a SITE DOMAIN variable in wrangler.toml to your domain and it overrides the displayed host. Not getting alerts? Check, in order: Is the Worker on your traffic? In the dashboard, confirm the Route shows yourdomain.com/ on the right zone, and that your site is proxied by Cloudflare orange cloud in DNS . A Worker with no matching route never runs. Read the Worker logs. Enable Observability first Worker - Settings - Observability ; that is what surfaces channel send failures. Then open the Worker - Logs or npx wrangler tail and reload your test URL. The logs are explicit about the common failures: AI signal detected but NO notification channel is configured - you have not set NTFY TOPIC or any other channel. telegram channel failed: HTTP 401 ... or ntfy/whatsapp/discord/pushover/webhook - the channel is set but the token, chat id, key, or URL is wrong. The status code tells you which. A channel shows in Settings but the log says no channel is configured or a token looks set but fails empty ? On the Deploy-from-GitHub path this means you added that value as a plaintext Text variable and the last build wiped it. This is true for every channel value, not just ntfy. Re-add each one NTFY TOPIC , TELEGRAM BOT TOKEN , and the rest with Type: Secret , which survives builds, then redeploy. Subscribed to the right ntfy topic? The topic in the app must match NTFY TOPIC exactly, and notifications must be enabled for the ntfy app on your phone. Crawler alert throttled? You only get one per vendor per purpose per hour. Set CRAWLER THROTTLE SECONDS=0 and test again. Alerts stopped after working at first? Check the Worker's Observability logs. ntfy channel failed: HTTP 429 ... daily message quota reached means you hit ntfy.sh's free daily limit reached faster because the Worker publishes from Cloudflare's shared IPs, and immediately in crawlers / both mode . It resets daily. For reliable alerting use a per-account channel Telegram, Discord, Pushover , self-host ntfy and set NTFY SERVER , or upgrade ntfy.sh. Deploy returns HTTP 400 before any build runs . You used Clone a public repository via Git URL and the Cloudflare GitHub App cannot create the copied repo in your account. Fork the repo to your account and import your fork instead Option A above , or widen the Cloudflare GitHub App's repository access in GitHub under Settings - Applications - Installed GitHub Apps - Cloudflare - Configure . The core idea - that "AI traffic" is really two separate signals a provider fetching your page versus a human clicking through from an AI answer , detected two different ways - comes from our own analysis of real server logs: What nginx logs prove about AI traffic vs referral traffic https://surfacedby.com/blog/nginx-logs-ai-traffic-vs-referral-traffic . This tool applies those findings at the Cloudflare edge. Crawlers are matched by user-agent token GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and the rest , each tagged with its vendor and purpose. Matching is case-insensitive. Referrals are matched three ways: the referer hostname chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai, and more ; the native-app referer a mobile AI app sends android-app://com.openai.chatgpt/ and the like ; and utm source on the landing URL, because AI apps frequently strip the referer and stamp utm source=chatgpt.com instead. The referrer list is deliberately high-confidence: general search bing.com, duckduckgo.com, you.com and social x.com are excluded so ordinary traffic never triggers a false "AI" alert. ALERT ON gates which of the two are even looked for, so referrals mode does no crawler user-agent matching at all. Both signature lists live at the top of src/worker.js /surfacedby/ai-traffic-alerts-for-cloudflare/blob/master/src/worker.js . These signatures drift as vendors add and rename bots; the canonical, community-maintained crawler list is ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt . Re-pull it periodically and reconcile the list rather than guessing a token. Google/Gemini and Apple training opt-in. Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are robots.txt control tokens that do not crawl under their own user-agent Google's docs say so directly , so no edge tool can detect them by user-agent. Gemini: visitors yes, crawls no. You do see the humans Gemini sends you they carry a gemini.google.com referer or utm source , but you will not see Gemini crawl your page: it answers from Google's existing index and has no live-fetch user-agent to catch. Copilot and Grok: the fetch is invisible; the referral depends on the platform. Our log research found their provider fetch shows up as a plain browser an ordinary Chrome user-agent, no bot token , so there is no crawler signature to match and you will not see them crawl at all. Their human clickthroughs are a separate thing: this tool catches one whenever the click carries a copilot.microsoft.com or grok.com referer or a utm source , and cannot see one that arrives with neither it looks like ordinary direct traffic . How often each case happens is set by the platform's referrer policy; our research measured their crawler side, not their referral share, so we do not claim a catch rate. Google AI Overviews / AI Mode referrals arrive as plain google.com and are indistinguishable from an ordinary Google click, so they are not flagged flagging them would mislabel most of your Google traffic . User-agents can be spoofed. This is an alerting tool, so a rare spoofed crawler UA just means one extra notification, not a security hole. The crawl-side findings above - Gemini answering from its index without fetching, and Copilot and Grok fetching as plain browsers - are from our own server-log research: What nginx logs prove about AI traffic vs referral traffic https://surfacedby.com/blog/nginx-logs-ai-traffic-vs-referral-traffic . On the referral side, whether a human click carries a referer at all is decided by the sending platform's referrer policy not the browser , so a share of AI clickthroughs is simply unrecoverable at the edge. Measuring AI visibility evenly across every assistant needs cross-assistant measurement, not edge logs alone. The Worker stores nothing about your visitors. It reads the user-agent, referer, and utm source of each request, sends you a notification, and forwards the request to your origin. The optional KV holds only short-lived throttle keys like radar:OpenAI:training , never visitor data. This tool tells you an AI touched your site. The harder questions - which prompts you show up for, which exact sources the assistants cite, who they recommend instead of you, and whether any of it converts - need measurement across the assistants, not just your edge logs. That is the problem SurfacedBy https://surfacedby.com , the project behind this tool, works on. Built by Ali Khallad https://github.com/bomsn at SurfacedBy https://surfacedby.com . MIT. Use it, fork it, ship it.