VercatusCrawler requests and referral visits measure different activity
AI platforms crawl far more than they refer. Cloudflare Radar's crawl-to-refer ratios (pages crawled per referred visit) for July 2025 were about 38,066:1 for Anthropic (286,930:1 in January), 1,091:1 for OpenAI, 195:1 for Perplexity (55:1 in January), 40.7:1 for Microsoft and 5.4:1 for Google (January–July 2025 average 11.8:1). Citation visibility, not referral clicks, is therefore the main measurable return from answer engines.
Sources
- 1Cloudflare · 2025The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referralsblog.cloudflare.com
CGrade C: reputable industry data or observation. A grade describes the provenance of the sources above; it is not a probability that a change will work. The effect basis says how the size of the effect is known: measured by a study, taken from an industry report, only documented without a size, or not quantified.
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