AI referral traffic means visits from people who click a website link in an AI answer or search result. A link shown in an answer is not a visit until someone clicks it.
Analytics tools identify many of these visits from the source information sent with each click. That information is sometimes missing, and some people visit later by searching for the brand. Reported AI referrals may therefore undercount the visits AI influenced.
The crawl-to-referral ratio compares AI bot visits with tracked human visits from AI links over the same period. It is an estimate because bots may visit a page repeatedly and analytics may miss some human referrals.