AI referrals, crawlers and agents

AI assistants send you shoppers, read your pages and shop on people's behalf. The AI & agents page in your dashboard shows all three. This guide explains where each number comes from and what each platform can see.

AI referrals, AI crawler counts, the visibility check, agent detection and the developer hooks are free on every plan. Code caps, the offer feed and the note for agents need Stop or above.

What each platform sees#

	Shopify	WooCommerce	Custom store
AI referrals (visits)	Yes	Yes	Yes
AI orders from your own order data	Yes, automatic	Yes, plugin 1.3.1 and later	No
AI crawler counts	No	Yes, plugin 1.3 and later	Yes, with the server snippet
Visibility check	Yes, with Shopify's agent storefront	Yes	Yes
Agent detection and developer hooks	Yes	Yes	Yes

AI referrals#

A visit counts as AI-referred when the shopper arrives from an assistant's site, or with that assistant's utm_source on the link. Benson knows ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral Le Chat, You.com, Phind and Kagi Assistant, and the list grows as new assistants launch.

The AI referrals tab shows, for the range you pick:

• visits, their share of your traffic, orders, revenue, conversion and order value, by assistant;
• the pages AI shoppers land on;
• a daily trend for the top assistants.

Conversion counts AI visits that went on to order, out of all AI visits. Revenue is the order subtotal.

Orders from your store's own order data#

Benson's script can miss a visit: an ad blocker stopped it, the shopper declined consent, or the order came through an in-app browser. On Shopify and WooCommerce, Benson also reads where each order came from in the store's own data, so those orders still count.

• Shopify. Nothing to set up. Benson already reads your orders, and Shopify records the site that referred each buyer, the page they landed on, their first and last visit before the order, and the app the order was placed through. An order placed inside ChatGPT counts as placed inside an assistant. Shopify fills in the visit history shortly after the order, and Benson checks again within the hour.
• WooCommerce. Update to plugin 1.3.1. It sends the host of the referrer and the utm_source from WooCommerce's own order attribution, never the full referrer URL.

Each order counts once. When Benson saw the AI visit itself, that visit decides which assistant gets the order; the order data fills in only the orders it missed. The From your Shopify order data card (or From your WooCommerce order data) shows those extra orders: how many there were, how many had AI as the first visit, and how many were placed inside an assistant. Visits, share and conversion stay based on the visits Benson saw.

Orders from before your store had this feature aren't credited to AI after the fact.

What isn't counted as AI#

• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google sends those shoppers as google.com, so they count as Google search.
• Apps that strip the referrer. Their visits count as direct. On Shopify and WooCommerce, their orders can still be credited from the order data above.

AI crawlers#

AI crawlers fetch your pages without running JavaScript, so a storefront script can't see them. Benson counts them on your server instead and sorts each bot by what it's for:

• Training: pages copied to train AI models.
• Search index: pages indexed for AI search results.
• Live answers: pages read while answering a shopper.
• Agents: pages opened by agents shopping for someone.

The Crawlers tab shows fetches by bot, by purpose and by page. Bots are matched by user agent.

• WooCommerce. On by default from plugin 1.3. It never runs on admin, AJAX, REST or cron requests, and the benson_ai_fetch_enabled filter turns it off.
• Custom stores. Copy the server snippet from the Crawlers tab into your Node server (Next.js, Express, Remix). It posts each AI fetch to Benson without waiting for an answer. The site key in it is your public key, so it's safe to ship.
• Shopify. Shopify serves your storefront from its own servers, so there's nowhere to run a counter, and crawler numbers aren't available. A headless storefront (Hydrogen or your own front end) can add the server snippet.

Visibility check#

The Visibility tab reads your store the way AI bots do and tells you what to fix. It checks:

• robots.txt: whether each AI bot may read a product page, grouped by training, search and live answers;
• llms.txt and agents.md: whether you publish a guide for AI assistants;
• your sitemap: whether it loads;
• your agent storefront: whether AI agents can shop your store directly.

Every finding that needs work comes with the fix, written for your platform. On Shopify, robots.txt changes go in the theme's robots.txt.liquid template (Online Store › Themes › ⋯ › Edit code › Add a new template › robots), and the check gives you a starter that keeps Shopify's default rules.

Start it with Run the check. It takes a few seconds, and the result is kept for 12 hours. Check again reruns it, at most once a minute.

Shopify's agent storefront#

Stores with Shopify's agentic storefront switched on (Shopify admin › Settings › Sales channels) publish a Universal Commerce Protocol profile at /.well-known/ucp, along with an llms.txt and an agents.md. With it, AI agents can search your catalogue, build a cart, apply discount codes and check out without loading your theme.

When Benson finds the profile, the AI agents can buy from you card shows what agents can do on your store: shop, check out, apply discount codes, and read Shopify's instructions for agents. Shopify writes the llms.txt and agents.md for you, so there's nothing to upload.

Agents on your storefront#

When an AI agent or automation runs your storefront, Benson flags the session. Your developers can listen for it and skip the pop-ups and chat that only get in an agent's way:

• Benson.on("agent_detected") and Benson.state().agent in the JavaScript API;
• a data-benson-actor attribute on the page, switched on under Developers;
• a benson_agent_detected event in the dataLayer for Google Tag Manager.

On Stop and above, you can cap discount-code attempts per visit, publish an offer feed of the public offers you approve, and show agents a short note pointing them to it.

Limits#

• AI referrals depend on the assistant sending its site or utm_source. Assistants and browsers change what they send, and Benson updates its list as they do.
• Order-data credit uses what Shopify or WooCommerce recorded. Shopify sometimes has no visit history for an order, and WooCommerce only records attribution for orders placed after it was switched on.
• Crawler counts rely on the bot's user agent. A bot that hides it is counted as a person or not at all.
• The visibility check reads public files only. It can't see rules enforced by a firewall or a bot manager in front of your store.
• Agent detection sees what runs in the browser. Agents that only fetch pages never run Benson's script.