Stride

Agent activity

How Stride reads verified AI-agent visits from your own logs, what verified, claimed, and rejected mean, and why this is associated evidence — not causation.

Last updated 2026-08-29

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Agent activity answers the question robots.txt cannot: which AI agents actually requested your site, and what happened on those requests? It reads the logs you already own — your CDN or edge worker's view of each request — rather than adding any code to your pages.

Setup sources and coverage

Each transport ships its own panel on Analytics; panels are never combined, because the same request can legitimately arrive through more than one transport and a combined total would double-count it:

Source Coverage label Why
Cloudflare Worker (you install) Near-complete Runs on every edge request
Vercel Log Drains Sampled Drains are batched and can drop entries
Manual API Customer-reported You choose what to ship

Connect any of them from Dashboard → Settings → Integrations → AI crawler logs. Available on Scale and Agency plans during beta.

Verified, claimed, rejected

Every request is classified into exactly one of three identity states:

  • Verified — the source IP checks out against the agent operator's published identity (forward-confirmed reverse DNS or their published IP ranges). Only verified requests can ever attach to your proof records.
  • Claimed — the user agent says "I'm GPTBot", but the identity could not be checked. Counted separately, never as verified.
  • Rejected — the IP contradicted the claimed identity. These count as rejected and never as verified or claimed activity.

Identity is one dimension and the HTTP status is another: a verified request that got a 404 still counts as a verified request, and as a 4xx failure.

What is collected, and for how long

  • Requests are stored path-only — no query strings, no visitor personal data, no response bodies.
  • Raw log events purge after 30 days.
  • Daily aggregates — including per-path, per-status breakdowns — keep for 400 days. The "All" range on Analytics means this retained window, not unlimited history.
  • Deleting your site or organization deletes the data (cascade), and revoking an ingest key stops collection immediately. Proof records already written from verified visits are historical ledger entries and are not deleted by a key revocation or plan downgrade.

User-triggered fetches are different

Fetches from user agents like ChatGPT-User fire when a person opens a cited link inside an assistant. They are a live signal that humans are clicking through to your site from AI answers — an activity proxy, not a retained AI response. Citation evidence in Stride always comes from retained AI answers, never from these fetches.

Associated evidence, not causation

When a verified agent requests the exact page a shipped change targeted — on a UTC day after the deployment day — Stride records a dated "Agent visit" step on that effort's Proof of work timeline. The strict day boundary exists because daily aggregates cannot prove a request happened after a deployment on the same day, so same-day visits are conservatively not attached.

This is association: the visit is measured, dated, and real, but a visit after a change is not proof the change caused it — just as a later scan movement or a GA4 window is observed timing, not causation. Steps without evidence stay honestly marked Waiting, Unavailable, or Not tracked.

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