Springnest Product Update: Stop guessing whether AI can see your website

This is a big one: you can now see how often ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools read your website, and how many people land on your site from their answers. It's called the AI Assistants View in Springnest Dashboard.

We've been writing a ton about the importance of your website being visible to AI, built features to help you to be seen and understood by AI, and now we're showing you the numbers.

What you'll see in this new view

• AI reads: How often ChatGPT, Claude and the others (like Perplexity) opened and "read" pages on your site while answering someone's question, and which pages they went to.
• Visits from AI. How many people clicked on a link the AI recommended in those answers, and landed on your site. There's also a map showing where they're from.
• By Assistant: This shows which assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity) read your site, and how many of the reads came from which one.
• The AI Visibility Checklist: A simple checklist of things that you need to have in place to ensure your AI Visibility Health is up to scratch. It clearly shows what's already been taken care of, and what you can still do from your side to improve your visibility.
• Top Ten Pages AI Assistants Read: The pages AI Assistants read most often, over the past 30 days. Think of these as the pages that are currently creating the most exposure for you in these tools.

How it works

When an AI tool opens a page on your site it leaves a record on our servers, same as any other visitor (most commonly known a visit on your website, nothing new here). Springnest analyses those records once a day, counts the ones that came from AI, and presents them to you in this view.

(Feel free to skip over the next paragraph if you're not interested in nerding out over this)

The counting is the tricky part, and it's quite interesting to understand why. Any bot can name itself ChatGPT or Claude or whatever popular AI tool. That sounds strange, but plenty of software at the moment does that (we saw this first-hand while testing this feature when a tool designed to find vulnerabilities on websites visited Springnest sites while pretending to be different popular AI assistants). Bottom line, if we counted the visits by name alone, it would have put inflated and incorrect numbers on your dashboard (essentially painting a better picture for you than the reality, which is a marketer's nightmare).

So, to ensure we show you the most legitimate data for this view, we check the address each request came from against the list every AI company publishes, and throw out everything that doesn't match. This could mean that your numbers will be lower than what other tools or reports show you, but I'm happy to say that it's honest and real.

Nerd, out.

Why your first look might feel underwhelming

If you're a smaller or more specialist property, it's ok to expect a handful of reads a week. Zero even, depending on how new your website and brand are. At the time this was written, we hadn't tracked a full month's AI reads and visits yet, so you'll see only a handful of days' worth of data.

We considered waiting until we had more data to show and process before making this live, but we'd rather you start tracking it from here and see it move, than delay giving you access to this information.

I'd suggest looking at the bigger picture: this opportunity for visibility is just going to keep growing. At the Tourism Innovation Summit in Seville this month, Raúl Álvarez Barrera, who leads digital at Radisson, openly spoke about losing about 20% of their search traffic before anyone in their team worked out that AI tools weren't recommending their hotels at all. His more useful point, for us anyway: a small property that's done the work can come up ahead of a chain that hasn't.

What actually helps you be more visible (which is why we built the AI Visibility Checklist)

More good news: we've done most of the heavy lifting for you here. Every Springnest page carries schema markup, and your site publishes a summary file (called llms.txt) for AI tools to read. We've also built tools for you to manage how AI may use your site and content, and they're all set to “allow'“ by default.

The two things worth your time:

• An FAQ page: AI tools want plain answers to the questions guests actually ask. Parking, breakfast times, how far the beach is. If you haven't yet, learn how to write an FAQ page that helps your visitors, and helps AI cite your website.
• Add Image Alt Tags: AI tools are great at analysing images, but not necessarily able to understand the context behind it (it can see a swimming pool, but does it know that it's a private heated pool in one of your villas? Probably not. So tell it with an alt tag). Adding alt tags to images can be cumbersome and manual, so we've built an AI tool for you right in Springnest Admin, to analyse and write tags for you automatically. (See what we’re doing here? Using AI to build AI tools to help you be understood by AI. What a time to be alive). You can then see where you want to colour in the details with some added facts.

There are things that won't show up

• The photos on your site are served from a different place than the rest of your content, so they're not part of the count (meaning, AI might view your image files, but that won't show up in the data). This is under consideration for a future update.
• If you have set up your own Cloudflare, and it’s set to block AI bots, you'll see zero. Those requests never reach us, our hands are tied here.
• It's also good to know that ChatGPT and Claude don't necessarily always show us where a visitor came from, so the "Visits from AI" metric is likely conservatively lower than the truth. Somewhat of an under-promise, over-deliver scenario.

Where to find it

In Springnest Admin, Click the Dashboard Tab, and Navigate to the AI Assistants section. Be sure to scroll to the AI Visibility Checklist, and see whether you have any tasks to add to your schedule in the coming weeks.