So here’s a weird thing that happened to me.
I was digging through server logs a few months back and noticed a visitor that read a product page, jumped to the shipping policy, went back to the product, and left. All in about 40 seconds. No mouse wandering, no idle time, nothing. Too fast for a person, too curious for a crawler.
It was ChatGPT. Shopping. For an actual human somewhere who asked it to find something.
The part that got me: in Google Analytics this visit just says “Direct.” Same label as your mom typing your URL. So somewhere out there, an AI compared your store to three competitors, decided your shipping page was confusing, recommended someone else, and your analytics recorded… nothing happened today.
And this isn’t rare anymore. Adobe says AI-referred traffic to retail sites grew almost 400% in a year, and those shoppers actually convert better than regular ones. So the invisible visitors are, annoyingly, the good ones.
That bugged me enough that I built something. Full disclosure, this is my app, I’m the developer, feel free to apply skepticism.
It’s called Crawlight. It sits on your store and tells you which visits are human and which are AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and friends), what pages they looked at, whether an order came out of it, and it can ping your Slack the moment one walks in. Some agents dress up as normal browsers, so there’s a confidence score instead of me pretending detection is perfect. It’s not. I’m working on it.
Free plan exists, setup is a couple of minutes, no code: Crawlight - See which AI agents visit, browse, and buy in your... | Shopify App Store
I’m one guy building this, so honestly the feedback is worth more to me than the install. If you put it on your store and the data is surprising, or boring, or wrong, tell me. Two merchants asked for real-time alerts a while back and I shipped it the next day, that’s roughly my speed.
Also happy to answer AI traffic questions here in general, app or no app. I’ve been staring at this stuff for months and it’s genuinely strange out there.
Update: the free plan is live.
When I first posted this I said it was free, and anyone who clicked through would have found a $19 plan with a trial. That was on me, sorry. It’s a real Free plan now, no trial clock, no card.
Free covers the whole detection side: which AI agents visited, which pages they read, 30 days of history. Paid is for longer history, revenue attribution and real-time alerts. You don’t need it to find out whether ChatGPT is walking through your store.
Separately, and this needs no install at all: if you want to know whether AI agents can actually read your store, drop your URL here and I’ll check it for you for free. I’ll look at whether robots.txt is blocking the AI crawlers, whether your product content is in the initial HTML or only appears after JavaScript runs, whether your structured data is complete, and whether your shipping and returns pages are clear enough for an agent to quote from. I’ll post what I find. No signup, no app, no catch.
I’m doing this because I want to see more real stores. Also happy to hear from anyone who installs and finds nothing, “no agents visited me” is a real answer and I’d like to know how common it is.