Arbling Beacon

People now find stores and services by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot. Arbling Beacon shows you that traffic in your Arbling dashboard:

• Visits from AI assistants. You see which assistant sent each visit and which pages they landed on.
• AI crawlers. You see which AI crawlers read your pages and which pages they read. Add the crawler reporting key to turn this on.
• WooCommerce products. On a WooCommerce store, product pages also tell Arbling which product was viewed. WooCommerce is optional: the plugin works on any WordPress site.
• WooCommerce orders. The order confirmation page tells Arbling the order number and total, so an order is matched to the AI visit that led to it that day.

The plugin respects your visitors’ privacy choices:

• Nothing loads until you save your Arbling site key.
• It follows the visitor’s consent through the WP Consent API when your consent banner supports it.
• Visit counts made on your server carry no personal data.

You need an Arbling account to see the numbers. You copy the site key from your Arbling dashboard; the crawler reporting key is optional (see Installation).

External services

This plugin connects your site to Arbling (https://arbling.com), the service that shows you the numbers. It sends nothing until you save a key on its settings page (Settings → Arbling Beacon).

1. The Arbling beacon script, once a site key is saved.

• What loads: your pages load https://api.arbling.com/ati-beacon.js, tagged with your public site key.
• What it sends for every page view: the page’s path, the host name of the site the visitor came from, and whether that site is an AI assistant. This carries no identifier.
• What it adds only when the visitor’s consent allows it and your Arbling account has this turned on: for a visit that arrives from an AI assistant, it sends that visit with a random identifier kept in the browser’s local storage. Arbling uses the identifier to connect the visit to what the visitor does next. With a WP Consent API banner, the visitor must allow both statistics and marketing.
• What it never does: set a cookie.
• Where: https://api.arbling.com/api/ati/visits.

2. Visit counts, once a crawler reporting key is saved.

• What it sends: once a minute, your server sends how many requests each kind of page received in each closed minute. The kinds are home, product, collection and other. Each count says whether the visit came from a browser or something else, and which AI assistant referred it, if any.
• What it never sends: IP addresses, browser strings or page addresses.
• Where: https://api.arbling.com/api/ati/v1/crawl-events.

3. AI crawler reports, once a crawler reporting key is saved.

• When: only when a request comes from a known AI crawler, such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot.
• What it sends: the crawler’s user agent, its IP address (Arbling uses it to verify the crawler is genuine) and the kind of page. Requests from people are never reported this way.
• Where: https://api.arbling.com/api/ati/v1/crawl-events.

4. Orders on a WooCommerce store.

• On the order confirmation page, once a site key is saved: the beacon sends the order number and total with the page view. This carries no identifier.
• From your server, once a crawler reporting key is saved and only when Arbling has turned it on for your store: when checkout creates an order, your server sends the order number, its total, and the buyer’s IP address and browser string as WooCommerce recorded them on the order. Arbling uses the IP address and browser string only to find that day’s visit to your site, and does not store them. This matches an order to its AI visit even when the confirmation page never loaded.
• How the plugin knows whether it is turned on: once a minute, your server asks Arbling for your store’s setting and keeps a yes for at most ten minutes. Until Arbling says yes, the plugin does not read or send anything about the buyer.
• Where: https://api.arbling.com/api/ati/v1/order-events and https://api.arbling.com/api/ati/v1/order-events/policy.

Arbling’s terms of service: https://arbling.com/terms
Arbling’s privacy policy: https://arbling.com/privacy