Understanding AI agents vs visitors from AI
Voris talks about “AI” in two different ways, and it is easy to mix them up. They are not the same thing. This short article explains the difference so the AI Visibility tab and the AI traffic channel make sense.
The one-line version
- AI agents are software crawling or accessing your site.
- Visitors from AI are real people who clicked through to your site from an AI assistant.
One is a machine reading your pages. The other is a human who found you through a chatbot.
AI agents (software)
An AI agent is a program — a crawler or bot run by an AI company — that fetches your pages directly. No person is on the other end of that request. Examples are the crawlers that gather pages to train models or to answer questions inside an assistant.
You see AI agents in the AI agents section of the AI Visibility tab, broken down by operator (the company or product running the agent), with the user-agent we observed.
A few things worth knowing:
- AI agents are classified as software, never as the person behind a visit.
- Classic search crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot are not counted as AI agents — they are a separate category and do not appear in the AI agents section.
- Whether AI agents are counted in your other reports depends on the Humans only filter. By default they are included; turn the filter on to exclude them.
Visitors from AI (people)
A visitor from AI is a real person. They asked an AI assistant something, the assistant linked to your site, they clicked, and they landed on your page. That is a human visit — it just came through an AI assistant instead of a search engine or a social post.
You see visitors from AI in two places:
- The Visitors from AI section of the AI Visibility tab — per assistant, with conversion and landing pages.
- The AI channel in the Channel mix on the Referrers report — see The AI traffic channel.
Because these are people, they are counted the way other human traffic is counted, and they respect the Humans only filter.
Side by side
| AI agents | Visitors from AI | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Software (a crawler or bot) | A real person |
| How it reaches you | Fetches your pages directly | Clicks a link from an AI assistant |
| Where you see it | AI Visibility tab → AI agents | AI Visibility tab → Visitors from AI; AI channel on Referrers |
| Affected by “Humans only”? | Yes — excluded when on | Counted as people (they are not agents) |
| Search crawlers included? | No (Googlebot/Bingbot are separate) | n/a |
Why the counts are “directional” on Mode A
On Mode A sites there are no cookies and no visitor or session IDs, so Voris cannot tell two visits by the same person apart. That is why the AI Visibility numbers are at pageview grain and the conversion rate is described as directional rather than exact. It is a deliberate, honest framing — the numbers get more precise when session identity arrives in a later privacy mode. See Privacy modes explained.
Related
- The AI Visibility tab — both sections in detail.
- The humans-only filter — how agents are included or excluded.
- The AI traffic channel — where visitors from AI show up in Channel mix.
- Understanding your dashboard — the rest of your reports.