Vercel

See which AI agents crawl your Vercel site

AI agents read your site every day. Vercel Analytics doesn't show you a single one of them. Here's how to see them — no code, no deploy.

Why you can't see them today

Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights are both client-side: they load in the visitor's browser. An AI agent fetches your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so it never appears. The traffic is real and it's in your logs — nothing is reading them for agents.

The reason there's no script tag to paste. AI agents don't execute JavaScript. Every analytics tool you already run is a browser tag, so it never fires for an agent — which is why your dashboards show none of this traffic. The only way to see it is server-side, at the edge, or in your logs.

See yours before you install anything

Paste a chunk of your access log and we'll pull out the AI agents that crawled you, what they read, and the files they asked for and couldn't find. No account, nothing stored.

Check my log free →

Install: Log drain

No code required. Captures response status, so you also see the pages agents asked for and didn't get.

Connect Vercel (one click). Sign up for Pickrate (free), open Setup, and hit Connect Vercel. You authorize once and we create the drain on your account, configured correctly — no URL to paste and no verification value to hunt for. If you'd rather wire it by hand, the remaining steps are the manual path.
Or: create your drain URL. In Setup, create the Vercel drain manually and copy the URL it gives you.
Add the drain in Vercel. Project → Settings → Log Drains → Add. Paste the URL. Choose sources static, lambda, and edge. Leave the format as NDJSON or JSON — both work.
Paste the verification value back. Vercel shows a verification value and won't save the drain until our endpoint echoes it. It's specific to your Vercel team, so paste it into Pickrate's Setup page first, then hit Add in Vercel.
Watch the agents arrive. Vercel starts streaming within a minute or two. Your dashboard fills with which agents read you, which pages they pull, and which agent surfaces they asked for and couldn't find.

Gotchas worth knowing first

Log drains need Vercel Pro or Enterprise

They aren't available on Hobby. On Hobby, use the one-line Next.js middleware instead — the only thing you give up is response status.

Leave sampling at 100%

Vercel lets you sample a percentage of log lines. Sample at 10% and your agent read counts are a tenth of reality, with nothing on screen to tell you so. Agent traffic is a small fraction of total traffic to begin with; sampling it away defeats the point.

Preview deployments are excluded by default

Branch URLs on *.vercel.app do get crawled, but they aren't your site, and counting them inflates your numbers with traffic to code you never shipped. There's a toggle if you want them.

One request writes several log lines

A single page view can emit both a function log and a proxy record. We dedupe per request ID, so your read counts are requests, not log lines. If you build your own log pipeline, this is the bug you'll hit.

Questions

Why doesn't Vercel Analytics show AI crawlers?

Because it's a browser script. Vercel Analytics loads in the visitor's browser and reports from there. An AI agent requests your page, reads the HTML, and leaves without executing JavaScript, so the script never runs and the visit is never counted. This is true of Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, and every other client-side tool.

Does a log drain slow down my site?

No. It's entirely out of band — Vercel streams logs to us after the response has already been served. Your users never wait on anything, and there's no code in your app at all.

Do I need to change my code?

No. That's the point of the drain. You paste a URL into Vercel's dashboard and you're done, whatever framework you're running.

What if I'm on the Hobby plan?

Use the Next.js middleware — one line in middleware.ts. You lose response status (middleware runs before the response exists, so there's nothing to read), which means you won't see 404s on agent surfaces. Everything else is identical.

Other setups

Track AI agent traffic in Next.js — One line, any host. Doesn't see response status — middleware runs before the response.
Track AI agent traffic with a Cloudflare Worker — Goes in front of any origin. The only option when you don't control the codebase.
All install options — the full chooser, including pasting a log with no install at all.
Developer reference — every method in one place.

Agent-readable version: https://pickrate.io/install/vercel.md