Question 1

What is BotWatcher?

Accepted Answer

BotWatcher is a free AI bot traffic analytics tool that detects GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and 40+ AI crawlers hitting your website. It uses drop-in Next.js middleware and provides a real-time dashboard showing which bots visit, which pages they crawl, and where they come from.

Question 2

Which AI bots does BotWatcher track?

Accepted Answer

BotWatcher tracks 40+ AI bots across 14 categories including GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Google), Meta-ExternalAgent (Meta), GrokBot (xAI), Bytespider (ByteDance), Amazonbot (Amazon), Applebot, BraveBot, DeepSeekBot, LangChain, AutoGPT, MCP clients, httpx, curl, and more.

Question 3

How do I set up BotWatcher?

Accepted Answer

Setup takes 2 minutes: 1) Sign up with your website URL and email to get an API key. 2) Copy the middleware.ts file into your Next.js project root. 3) Add 3 environment variables (API key, webhook URL, and domain). 4) Deploy. Bot hits appear on your dashboard within seconds. No npm install or config files needed.

Question 4

Is BotWatcher free?

Accepted Answer

Yes, BotWatcher is free and open source. Sign up to get a free API key with 1 month of access to the full dashboard including charts, world maps, per-bot analytics, and executive summaries.

Question 5

Why can't Google Analytics see AI bot traffic?

Accepted Answer

Google Analytics relies on JavaScript execution in a browser. AI bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot make server-side HTTP requests without executing JavaScript, so they are invisible to Google Analytics. BotWatcher uses server-side middleware to detect these bots at the request level before the page even renders.

Question 6

What frameworks does BotWatcher support?

Accepted Answer

BotWatcher currently provides a drop-in middleware for Next.js that works on any hosting platform including Vercel, DigitalOcean, Railway, and others. The middleware intercepts requests at the edge and reports bot hits to the BotWatcher API.

AI bots are crawling your site right now.
Google Analytics can't see them.

What It Tracks

Setup in 2 Minutes

Drop in the middleware

Add 3 env vars

See your traffic

The Dashboard

Start Tracking Your AI Bot Traffic

AI bots are crawling your site right now.Google Analytics can't see them.