Cloudflare — who fetches your pages
What this shows you
Publishing is something we do. Being cited is something we measure. In between sit two steps nobody could see: whether an AI crawler ever came for the page, and whether an assistant fetched it while answering somebody's question. Your own site's edge is the only place those are recorded. Cloudflare keeps a log of every request, including the ones from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest — so if your site sits behind Cloudflare, you can see exactly which of the pages we published anything has come for. Cloudflare's side of this is free. The token is yours, you create it, and you can revoke it whenever you like.
Creating the token
1. In Cloudflare, open My Profile → API Tokens → Create Token → Create Custom Token. 2. Give it a name you will recognise later, such as "The Ranking Factory — crawler reads". 3. Add TWO permissions: • Zone → Analytics → Read • Zone → Zone → Read 4. Under Zone Resources, choose Include → Specific zone → the one site you are connecting. 5. Create the token and copy it. Cloudflare shows it once. 6. Copy the Zone ID too: it is on the Overview page of that site in Cloudflare, in the right-hand column. 7. Paste both into "AI crawlers on your site" on the project's settings tab. Scope it to the ONE zone you are connecting. A token that covers every zone on your account is a bigger thing to lose than one that covers a single site, and we never need more than the site in front of us.
Why two permissions and not one
Analytics → Read is what lets us count the requests. On its own that is enough to report who fetched what. Zone → Read tells us one extra thing: the date your site started being served by Cloudflare. That matters more than it sounds. Cloudflare only has records for traffic that actually passed through it, so a zone you connected this morning holds nothing at all about last week — and without knowing when it started, an empty week is indistinguishable from a quiet one. We will not report "nothing came for your pages" when the honest answer is "we have only been watching since Tuesday". If the token cannot read the zone's start date we fall back to the first date we successfully read your analytics, and say so on the card. Adding the second permission simply makes that line accurate from the beginning rather than cautious.
What the numbers mean, and what they do not
A hit is a request whose user agent gave a name. Anyone can put any name in a user agent, so read it as "something calling itself GPTBot fetched this page" — for the question this answers, which is whether anything came for the page at all, that is both honest and sufficient. A fetch is not a citation. A crawler taking your page means it was reachable and worth taking; it does not mean an answer used it. Those are different steps and we keep them apart. Crawler names ending in "-User" — ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User — are different again. They fetch because a person asked something right now, so they are the closest thing to evidence that your page was pulled into a live answer. Search engine crawlers such as Googlebot are logged but kept out of the AI count. Googlebot visiting says nothing about AI answers, and counting it would inflate the only number here that matters.
Pages we cannot see
Only pages on this site's own domain are covered. Anything we publish to Google Docs, Blogger or another third-party property is served by somebody else's edge, so no token of yours can report on it. Those pages are counted separately and named, rather than listed as though nothing came for them.
When it runs
Once a night, shortly after each day closes, plus a backfill of any day within Cloudflare's retention that has not been read yet — usually about a week. Cloudflare limits how much can be read at once. If a backfill runs out of budget the job stops that site cleanly and picks up where it left off the following night, so a first read across several sites may take a couple of nights to fill in. Nothing is lost by waiting. Available on Growth and above.