Unsourced – AI Bot Monitor & AI Search Citation Tracker

Unsourced is a measurement and evidence tool, not a magic ranking switch. It shows you exactly which AI assistants already cite you, which ones crawl your site, and which send readers to competitors instead, then re-checks whether the changes you make actually move your citations. That evidence is what lets you improve your presence in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude and other AI answers deliberately, instead of guessing. It does not pay for placement or guarantee a citation, and it is honest about that.

They are emerging names for the same shift: optimising so AI assistants cite your content when they answer questions, the way SEO optimises for Google's results pages. GEO stands for generative engine optimization, AEO for answer engine optimization, and "AI SEO" is the catch-all. Unsourced is the evidence layer for all three: instead of selling you an inferred "visibility score", it shows verified crawler activity, real citation results across 7 AI models, and measured before-and-after when you act on a gap.

No. The server-side bot check is a lightweight PHP hook that adds negligible overhead, and the report to Unsourced is a non-blocking background request, so your page renders immediately without waiting for it. The plugin adds no JavaScript to your pages.

No. Unsourced is a monitoring and intelligence tool, not a firewall. Bots are recorded and reported but served normally. Use your robots.txt or a WAF if you want to restrict access.

Citation monitoring is the core intelligence feature of the Unsourced platform. Once your site is verified, Unsourced runs weekly checks across 7 AI models (ChatGPT, ChatGPT web search, Claude, Gemini grounded search, Grok, Meta Llama, and Perplexity). It generates a set of high-intent questions based on your actual content topics (the same kind of queries your readers type into AI assistants) and checks whether the AI cites your domain in its response. Every result is logged, including uncited responses (so you can see who the AI recommended instead of you).

It is how Unsourced tells a live crawl apart from training data. When an AI assistant's answer reproduces your wording, Unsourced checks whether a verified AI crawler (caught by this plugin's server-side detection) fetched that page in the same window. If it did, the citation is backed by a live crawl rather than older training data, and that is logged with a timestamp. The plugin injects no code into your pages to do this.

No. The plugin detects AI crawlers entirely server-side, in PHP, which is exactly what catches bots that do not run JavaScript. It adds no JavaScript or beacon to your pages, so there is nothing extra to load. If you also want to capture human visits, Unsourced offers a separate optional beacon snippet you can add yourself; it is not part of this plugin.

No. Unsourced offers a free 10-day trial with full access to bot detection, citation monitoring, and report generation. After the trial, an Indie (£39/mo), Studio (£89/mo) or Agency (£199/mo) subscription is required to continue.

WordPress.com managed hosting does not support third-party plugins. This plugin is for self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org sites). If you cannot install plugins, you can still add the Unsourced JS beacon manually via your theme or a custom code block.

No. The plugin requires a valid Unsourced API key to record events. Without it, the plugin loads but does not send any data.