3,800 AI citations, zero visits: which assistants actually send people

Short answer

In six months of analytics, ChatGPT sent 136 sessions and Gemini sent 4. Microsoft Copilot sent none — despite Bing Webmaster Tools reporting 3,800 citations of this site over three months. Google's AI Overview appears on 46.7% of the queries this site ranks for and cites it in 0% of them, including queries where the site ranks first. So citations and visits are not the same measurement, they do not move together, and the engine that publishes citation data is not the one sending readers.

The two measurements, side by side

One side comes from Bing Webmaster Tools, which reports how often Microsoft Copilot and its partners cite a site: 3,800 citations for this directory over three months, rising steadily, concentrated on ten grounding queries. The other side comes from analytics — the referrer recorded when a visitor arrives. Over six months: chatgpt.com sent 136 sessions, gemini.google.com sent 4, and every other assistant sent zero.

Copilot is in that zero. The engine that publishes the citation number is the one that sends nobody. We are not offering a theory about why; we are reporting that the two numbers exist, come from different systems, and do not agree.

Mentioned here: 🌀 Wormhole, ✏️ Excalidraw, 🖼️ Photopea

What the citations are actually about

All ten queries that generate citations are the names of apps in the catalogue — audio mass, wormhole file transfer, wormhole app, soundslice app, Excalidraw offline features. Not one is a question about directories, lists, or where to find web apps.

Bing also publishes a citation share per query, which is the fraction of answers to that question that quote you. Dividing citations by that share gives the number of times the question was asked: audio mass was asked roughly 11,000 times and we are quoted in 10.8% of the answers; wormhole file transfer roughly 3,500 times, quoted in 31.7%. The share is not a quality score — it measures how contested the question is. A low share on a big question means several sources are answering it well.

Google's AI Overview is a separate story again

Across the queries this site is tracked on, Google shows an AI Overview on 46.7% of them and cites this site in none — including queries where the site holds position one. Ranking first does not put you in the summary above the results.

It has not cost anything measurable so far. On the site's main branded query, clicks per day went up over the same period, and the drop in click-through rate has a 12% chance of being noise on the volume available. The absence of citation is a fact; the harm is a hypothesis we have not been able to confirm.

What this means if you want your app read by machines

Serve your content without requiring JavaScript. This is the one thing that reliably decides whether a machine sees you at all. We fetched the four remaining PWA directories the way a crawler does and one of them returned 33 bytes with zero links — its whole catalogue is invisible to any reader that does not run a browser.

Measure the referrer, not the citation. Citation counts are the metric that is easy to publish and easy to sell; the referrer is the one that tells you whether anybody came. They are free to collect — chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com appear in any analytics tool you already have.

And be somewhere that describes what your app does in prose. Every citation we receive quotes a description, not a row in a table. A listing that says only a name and a URL gives an assistant nothing to quote.

Frequently asked

Why would an engine cite a site and send no traffic?

A citation means the answer quoted the source; a visit means the reader clicked through to it. Those are different events, and an assistant that answers well removes much of the reason to click. We can confirm both numbers for this site; we cannot confirm the mechanism, and anyone telling you they can measure Copilot click-through from the outside is guessing.

How do I check which assistants send me visits?

Look at the referrer field in whatever analytics you already run and filter for the assistant hostnames — chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com. It costs nothing and it is the only measurement that ties an AI mention to a person arriving.

Is being cited worth anything if it sends no visits?

It is worth something different from traffic. A citation puts your app inside the answer someone receives, which shapes what they believe before they ever search. What it does not do, on the evidence here, is deliver a visitor you can count. Both things can be true, and you should decide which one you are actually buying.