GlossaryLive fetch

What is live fetch?

A live fetch is a request an AI assistant makes for a page right now, because a person in a conversation asked something the assistant needs that page to answer. Each live fetch stands for one reader, arriving through an assistant instead of a browser.

Also called: live fetch agent, user-triggered fetch, on-demand fetch.

ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User are live fetch agents. They only appear when someone is actively using the assistant, so their visits are the closest thing to a pageview an AI product produces, and the pages they fetch are a map of what people are asking assistants about on your site.

A live fetch never runs your analytics script, so the reader it represents is invisible everywhere except the server log. Blocking a live fetch agent does not remove you from any index; it stops the assistant from reading your page when a person asks about it, and the person usually sees a message that the page could not be fetched.

One question can trigger several fetches, and the same user agent is used when an assistant browses several pages on the person’s behalf. So live fetch counts are reported as fetch events, not people, and they are a floor.

Live fetch agents in the registry

All live fetch agents.

Related terms

  • AI agent: An AI agent is any automated visitor that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI product: the crawler that collects training data, the crawler that builds an AI search index, and the fetcher that reads a page live while a person is talking to an assistant..
  • AI search crawler: An AI search crawler is a crawler that builds the index an AI assistant searches and cites from.
  • AI citation: An AI citation is an assistant naming or linking your page in its answer.
  • Floor: A floor is a count reported as "at least this many": the number that could be measured, with the acknowledgement that the true number may be higher.

Published 2026-09-21, updated 2026-09-21.

See it in your logs

One command, nothing to install

Point it at CloudFront, nginx or Apache logs. Every AI agent that visited gets its own row, verified against the addresses its operator publishes.

$ npx agenttraffic ./logs --days 7Quick start

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