product · May 16, 2026
Netlify Introduces Log Drains for Tracking AI Crawler Traffic and AEO Optimization
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Netlify published guidance on May 15, 2026, for using Log Drains to capture server-level data from AI crawlers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot before analytics filtering occurs. Enterprise plan users enable Log Drains in Site settings to stream traffic to destinations like Datadog or AEO platforms such as Profound for analysis of crawl frequency on high-value pages. The tool identifies gaps in AI discovery and supports content adjustments via robots.txt, internal links, and sitemaps, creating a feedback loop with Netlify Agent Runners for testing visibility changes. Netlify Log Drains address the limitation where traditional analytics exclude bot traffic from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.