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CiteMe Research

Who read this page?

A website learns which AI assistant sent a visitor from a label on the click, and for five days in October ChatGPT's links carried none. In our lab, every assistant that read the page live could be identified from its own requests, three of them while passing for a browser. On client sites, a usable read came before only about one ChatGPT click in a hundred.

Maxime Mansiet, Maël Bourdin, Alex Teillet · 17 October 2026

Read the report (PDF)All reports
8/8
assistants that read the test page live were identified from their requests
−60%
tagged ChatGPT clicks per day on ten client sites while its links went untagged
1.1%
of 2,179 labelled ChatGPT clicks had a live read in the two minutes before, beyond chance

Summary

An assistant decides whether the clicks it sends carry a label. What it cannot withhold is its own read of the page: to answer, it fetches the page from its own servers, and that request reaches the site like any other. We tested nine assistants on the web and on Android against a page with known answers, then ran the same read-to-click match on 2,179 ChatGPT clicks from client sites with the label hidden, against a control shifted by a day. Fingerprints tell a site which assistants read it. They recover a click only when the assistant reads live, and in the wild ChatGPT rarely does.

Inside the report

  1. 01Labels are a courtesy: ChatGPT's tag vanished for five days, and seven of nine assistants send some clicks with none
  2. 02Every assistant that reads a page live can be identified, including three that pass for browsers
  3. 03The fetcher's network sometimes names the engine; the visitor's address never does
  4. 04In the lab the read comes minutes before the click, and matching named the right assistant 7 of 7 times
  5. 05On client sites a usable read precedes about one ChatGPT click in a hundred
  6. 06Two traps when counting AI clicks: paid ChatGPT ads, and tags copied onto internal links

The lab is one tester with an Android phone, a Mac and an iPhone for controls, and every prompt contained the page’s address, which pushes an assistant to read it live. The client sites are not a sample of the web: they bought a generative engine optimisation product, which skews toward sites that already get AI traffic. Aggregates only: no site is identified.62 lab clicks across 9 assistants, 14 to 16 October 2026. 2,179 labelled ChatGPT clicks on client sites, 1 September to 16 October 2026