A technical hub written by Jean-Jacques Valognes: the method used in production to tell a real visitor from a bot, an AI agent from a malicious probe, and to know whether a content partnership actually pays off.
Most tools classify traffic by user-agent. That's a mistake: a malicious scanner can impersonate GPTBot. The path requested must always take priority over what the visitor claims to be.
A content page that links out to a partner has a known production cost and revenue hidden behind an attribution wall. A simple equation separates what you measure yourself from what only the partner knows.