SurfacedBy AI Visibility is a free WordPress plugin for seeing AI crawler activity and AI-referred visits in wp-admin. It keeps the logs in your WordPress database and works without a SurfacedBy account or subscription.
Open the AI Bots tab to see recorded crawler requests, including the page, bot and purpose. The purpose matters: a training crawler, a search-indexing bot and a fetcher answering someone’s question are doing different jobs. The labels help you tell them apart.
AI Referrals shows recorded visits from assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, with the assistant and the page visited. You can export the logs as CSV to inspect them outside WordPress.
Check access as well as activity
The Readiness tab checks robots.txt access, llms.txt and structured data. It can help you spot a blocked retrieval bot or missing page markup before interpreting an empty log. Its score is the plugin’s diagnostic, not a prediction that AI will cite your site. The plugin reads your robots.txt; it does not change its rules.
Use it locally, or connect your workspace
The plugin sends no tracking data to SurfacedBy until you choose to pair it. If you use the service, connecting your Site ID sends the recorded activity to your domain’s Tracking page. The dashboard can also check crawler identity against published vendor address ranges, where those are available. The standalone log identifies bots by their user agent, which can be imitated.
Dashboard tracking requires a paid plan or trial. The crawler activity update shows the page-level and weekly views you get there.
There is one setup detail to check: crawler logging runs in PHP, so requests served entirely by a page cache or CDN can bypass it. For sites behind Cloudflare, the edge tracker can record requests before they reach WordPress. The plugin’s browser script can record referrals on cached pages, but visits without a recognizable AI source are still missed.
To try the plugin, search for SurfacedBy AI Visibility in the WordPress plugin directory, install it and open SurfacedBy in the admin sidebar. If you use a page cache, purge it after activation so cached pages include the referral script.
