You are reading the archived Week of September 6, 2026 report. Numbers on this page are a snapshot from 2026-09-13 and do not change. For the current week, see the latest report.

The Optimly AI Search Trends Index · Week of September 6, 2026

Emergency Medical Training & Certification drew more AI-agent page visits than any other category this week

Crisis Medicine Llc drew the most visits inside Emergency Medical Training & Certification, across 1 brand in the category. 485,298 visits from automated agents this week. A page visit records that an agent requested the page and nothing more.

What a page visit is, and what it is not.
This index counts page visits: an automated agent asked optimly.ai for a page, and our server logged it. That is all a page visit shows. It does not show that any AI product mentioned, cited, recommended, or sold a brand, and it does not show that a person asked a question. Where we cannot tell why a visit happened, we say we do not know. How we group visits →

Window: 2026-09-06 → 2026-09-13 · Published 2026-09-13

What stood out this week

Up to three findings, chosen from a fixed list of candidates. A finding only appears when it clears a minimum count, so a large percentage built on a handful of visits is left out.

  1. User-directed activity, as Cloudflare labels it, is 1.9× more concentrated in this panel than across Cloudflare's network
    Cloudflare labels 7.8% of the AI-agent visits to this site as "User Action", against 4.2% across its whole network. Both figures use Cloudflare's classification, so the two sides are comparable.
    Why this matters. It shows whether this site sees an unusual amount of the traffic Cloudflare attributes to a person's action, which affects how far these numbers can be generalised.
    What this does not show. This uses Cloudflare's "User Action" label on both sides, which is not the same thing as Optimly's user-directed group and will not match that number. Our side is out of visits to optimly.ai from the agents Cloudflare counts as AI agents (search-engine crawling excluded, to match the network figure); the network side is out of AI-agent visits across Cloudflare's whole network, as published by Cloudflare Radar.
  2. "Automated, no company named" moved down from 88.5% to 75.4% of all visits
    This is one of Optimly's five groups, measured against every visit Cloudflare flagged as automated on optimly.ai during the week. Cloudflare flagged the visit as automated but no company can be named. We do not know who sent it or why.
    Why this matters. A change in the mix means the reason agents are visiting has changed, even when the total looks flat.
    What this does not show. The previous week is a shorter sample scaled up to a seven-day equivalent, so small share changes are within the noise.
  3. 32.3% of requests this week returned an error
    147,867 visits of 458,468 visits returned a status of 400 or above. Those agents did not get the page they asked for.
    Why this matters. Agents that hit an error may not come back. This is the one number on the page we can fix directly.

Optimly's five groups

Every automated visit lands in exactly one of these five groups, so they add up to the week's total. Share is a percentage of every visit Cloudflare flagged as automated on optimly.ai during the week — 485,298 visits this week.

GroupVisitsShareWhat it means
Someone using an AI product 35,745 7.4% Visits from agents the company that runs them documents as firing when a person asks for something. This is the only group we connect to a person.
Search engine page crawling 49,279 10.2% Visits from agents that crawl pages so a search product can find them later. No person is waiting on these.
Model training collection 23,422 4.8% Visits that collect page text in bulk to build a model. No person is waiting on these.
Known company, reason for the visit unclear 10,792 2.2% We can name the company, but the company says the agent does more than one job, so we do not know the reason for any single visit.
Automated, no company named 366,060 75.4% Cloudflare flagged the visit as automated but no company can be named. We do not know who sent it or why.

Cloudflare's own labels for the reason for the visit

This is a second, separate grouping. Cloudflare publishes its own label for each AI agent it recognises, and applies the same labels across its whole network. These numbers are not a breakdown of the five groups above and will not match them, because they count a different set of visits and use a different denominator.

On this site

Share is a percentage of visits to optimly.ai from the agents Cloudflare counts as AI agents (search-engine crawling excluded, to match the network figure) — 458,468 visits this week.

Cloudflare labelVisitsShare
User Action35,8917.8%
Search26,4775.8%
Training23,4225.1%
Mixed Purpose6,6181.4%
Undeclared366,06079.8%

Across Cloudflare's network

Share is a percentage of AI-agent visits across Cloudflare's whole network, as published by Cloudflare Radar. Pulled 2026-09-13.

Cloudflare labelShare
Training43.7%
Mixed Purpose40.0%
Search10.4%
User Action4.2%
Undeclared1.7%

Under Cloudflare's own “User Action” label, 7.8% of the AI-agent visits to this site carry that label, against 4.2% across Cloudflare's network. That is 1.9× more concentrated in this panel than across Cloudflare's network. Both sides of that comparison use Cloudflare's label, not Optimly's groups.

Which of our pages the visits went to

We could match 333,649 visits to a page we publish, 68.8% of all automated visits. The percentages in this table are of matched visits only, not of the week's total.

Page kindVisitsShare of matched
Directory pages requested246,45073.9%
Brand data files requested31,8699.6%
Brand pages requested24,4797.3%
Change reports requested19,7375.9%
Category list pages requested6,6402.0%
Topic pages requested4,3741.3%
Comparison pages requested1000.0%

Which pages agents requested

Every number below counts page visits we observed in our own server logs: an automated agent asked optimly.ai for a specific page. A page visit records the request and nothing more. It does not show that any AI product mentioned, cited, recommended, or sold anything, and it does not show that a person asked a question.

Topics of the pages agents requested most often

These are short topic labels we assign to our own pages, so we can group page visits that keep coming back week after week. The label is our grouping of the page. It is not a person's exact question, and we do not know what anyone typed. Counts run from the week we started grouping pages this way, so the list builds up over time rather than reshuffling every week.

Solution cluster

Topic pages agents requested most this week

Each row is one of our own topic pages that an automated agent requested in the week of Week of September 6, 2026, ordered by how many times it was requested. The heading is the topic we assigned to the page. We do not know what any person typed, and a visit does not show that a person asked anything.

How to Measure AI Referral Traffic and Customers
Requested 17 times this week, most often by AI Crawler (behavioral). Group: solution.
AI Search Optimization for B2B SaaS
Requested 15 times this week, most often by AI Crawler (behavioral). Group: solution.
Conservative Alternatives to Aarp
Requested 14 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: evaluation. Not seen in the prior week.
AI Brand Visibility vs Accuracy: What Should You Measure?
Requested 13 times this week, most often by AI Crawler (behavioral). Group: evaluation.
Parks and Recreation Management
Requested 9 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: solution. Not seen in the prior week.
How to Correct What AI Says About Your Brand
Requested 8 times this week, most often by AI Crawler (behavioral). Group: solution.
Business Credit Card for Travel Rewards
Requested 8 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: solution. Not seen in the prior week.
Enterprise AI
Requested 8 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: solution. Not seen in the prior week.
Corporate Gifting
Requested 8 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: solution. Not seen in the prior week.
Alternative to Gpt 4
Requested 8 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: evaluation. Not seen in the prior week.
Digital Transformation Consulting Firms
Requested 8 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: solution. Not seen in the prior week.
Dell vs Nutanix for Enterprise Virtualization
Requested 7 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: evaluation. Not seen in the prior week.
Continuing to Wear Existing Wardrobe Without Purchasing New Items
Requested 6 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: problem. Not seen in the prior week.
Gpt 4 Benchmarks vs Llama 3
Requested 6 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: evaluation. Not seen in the prior week.
Build An App Without Coding
Requested 6 times this week, most often by AI Assistant (behavioral). Group: problem. Not seen in the prior week.

Comparison pages agents requested this week

Each row is a comparison page we publish that an automated agent requested this week. When we can match the comparison to a brand we already track, we link to that brand's page so agents can follow it.

Since we started measuring

This index started grouping pages by topic in 2026-W28. This week (Week of September 6, 2026) marks 9 archived weeks of continuous measurement. All counts labeled "total" or "lifetime" on this page are rolled up across every archived weekly report since inception; counts labeled "this week" are the week of Week of September 6, 2026 only.

Brands whose pages were requested far more this week

How to read a spike A spike is a brand whose index moved sharply upward this week, meaning automated agents requested that brand's page far more often than the week before. We attach the top news headline for the brand from the past 7 days as a possible explanation. We do not know that the headline caused the change.

No brands broke out yet. On a fresh install the WoW comparison window fills in after seven days; expect the first real spikes on the following Monday.

Search intent captured this week
AI systems tried to fetch /why-ai-recommends-brands. A live signal of what people are asking AI about — and what AI thinks Optimly should answer.
MCP agent traffic detected
Autonomous AI agents — not humans, not chatbots — are discovering Optimly through /mcp/tools/get_action_status/. Model Context Protocol traffic — autonomous AI agents (not humans) discovering Optimly through the MCP endpoint.
Is your brand in the index?
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Which agents requested pages from Optimly this week

485,298 visits from automated agents this week, a change of 69% against the prior week.

Why brand rows show an index, not a count Brand-level values are shown on a 0 to 100 index relative to this week's busiest brand, the way Google Trends does it. 100 is the busiest brand this week and everything else is scaled from it. Exact per-brand counts stay private; only the rollups on this page (the week total and the per-agent totals) are absolute numbers.

Agents that fetch a page while a request is in flight

AgentPage visitsUnique pages
AI Assistant (behavioral) 352,640 10,000
Claude-User 17,510 1,276
OAI-SearchBot 9,786 2,451
ChatGPT-User 8,651 1,736
Amazonbot 6,618 2,522
Perplexity-User 6,475 1,034
PerplexityBot 6,368 2,413
ShapBot 4,028 956
Claude-SearchBot 3,292 788
YouBot 2,839 368
DuckAssistBot 2,838 307
AI Search (behavioral) 618 212

Agents that collect page text in bulk

These agents collect page text to build a model rather than to answer a specific request, so no person is waiting on them. Listed for completeness, kept separate from the numbers above.

BotFetchesUnique pages
AI Crawler (behavioral) 12,802 8,615
GPTBot 10,676 2,121
Bytespider 4,997 1,191
ClaudeBot 3,918 846
Google-Extended 3,308 770
CCBot 461 292
Meta-ExternalAgent 62 12

Benchmark — how AI is crawling the whole internet

Optimly's own numbers are a slice of a much bigger picture. Cloudflare Radar publishes AI-bot activity across roughly 20% of all internet traffic. Comparing our zone to Radar shows whether Optimly is over- or under-indexed vs. the network baseline.

Why Optimly's data is different Radar covers every domain, every agent and every reason for a visit, and most of that is bulk collection of general content. This site is a brand directory built for machine readers, so the mix of agents that reach it looks different: more of the agents that fetch a page while a request is in flight, fewer of the ones collecting text in bulk. That is a fact about which agents arrive here, not evidence about what anyone asked.

Top AI crawlers (network-wide)

BotShare
Googlebot24.3%
Meta-ExternalAgent15.6%
other14.3%
ClaudeBot11.0%
Applebot8.1%
Bingbot7.6%
GPTBot6.0%
Amazonbot6.0%
Claude-SearchBot3.6%
OAI-SearchBot3.4%

Crawl purpose mix (network-wide)

PurposeShare
Training43.7%
Mixed Purpose40.0%
Search10.4%
User Action4.2%
Undeclared1.7%