Vercel Observability Adds AI Traffic Insights to Track How AI Bots Use Your Site
Vercel has added AI traffic insights to Vercel Observability, letting developers see how AI bots access their sites. The data covers requests per verified AI bot, most-crawled pages, assistant retrievals, Markdown requests and errors.
- Vercel Observability now includes AI traffic insights showing how AI bots access a site.
- Views cover requests by verified AI bot, most-crawled pages, assistant retrievals, Markdown requests and errors.
- The data is available in the dashboard under Observability > AI Traffic.
- The same metrics can be queried with vercel metrics in the Vercel CLI, which requires Observability Plus.
What the AI traffic insights show
According to Vercel, users can now query AI traffic in Vercel Observability to understand how AI bots reach their site. The feature breaks the activity down into five views.
- Requests by verified AI bot: how many requests each bot makes.
- Most-crawled pages: the pages AI crawlers request most often for indexing or model training.
- Assistant retrievals: pages that AI assistants fetch in response to user actions or search queries.
- Markdown requests: pages that AI bots request in Markdown format.
- Errors: pages where requests from AI bots return errors.
The split between crawling for indexing or model training and retrieval triggered by a user action or search query is a useful distinction. It separates bots that collect content in bulk from assistants that fetch a page because someone asked a question.
How to access the data
In the Vercel dashboard, the insights can be opened under Observability > AI Traffic. Vercel says that both users and their agents can also query the same metrics with vercel metrics in the Vercel CLI.
CLI queries require Observability Plus, according to the announcement. Vercel gives one example command: vc metrics vercel.ai_traffic.count --group-by botName. It returns AI traffic to a site broken down by bot name. The company points to its AI traffic documentation for further details.
What it means for site owners
For teams running sites on Vercel, the update puts AI bot activity in the same place as their other observability data. Site owners can check which verified bots are making requests, which pages draw the most attention from crawlers, and which pages return errors to AI bots. The Markdown view shows which pages bots ask for in that format.
The announcement does not give pricing for the dashboard view, and it does not say how many bots are covered beyond describing them as verified. Details on those points are left to the AI traffic documentation. The changelog entry credits Andrew Qu as a contributor.
