Common questions answered
Everything you need to know about how Unsourced works, what it measures, and what to expect when you start.
Getting started
Your free trial lasts 10 days with full access to all features. No credit card is required to sign up. If you choose to continue after the trial, you can add your payment details in Settings at any point.
Yes — Unsourced has a native WordPress plugin available from the WordPress Plugin Directory (wordpress.org/plugins/unsourced-ai-bot-monitor).
Once connected with your API key from the Settings page, it detects AI bots at the server (PHP) level — catching crawlers that do not execute JavaScript, which a standard JS snippet would miss. Detection runs entirely server-side, so no code changes or page edits are needed.
The plugin is the recommended setup for all WordPress sites, including managed hosting environments like WordPress.com, Kinsta, and WP Engine where nginx log access is unavailable.
The setup takes around five minutes:
- Add your website URL from the dashboard.
- Verify ownership — a meta tag in your HTML or a comment in your robots.txt file.
- Connect bot monitoring — choose the method that fits your stack:
- WordPress — install the Unsourced plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory (server-side, no JS required).
- Cloudflare Worker — download your pre-configured worker script and deploy it in the Cloudflare dashboard. Works on any site behind Cloudflare — Webflow, Framer, Shopify, custom stacks.
- Server-side snippet — for sites you run yourself (Vercel, Netlify, Node/Express, or any backend): drop in a small pre-configured snippet that reports AI crawlers server-side. Catches AI bots a JS snippet can’t.
- JS snippet — paste one script tag into your <head>. Works on any platform, but only captures bots that run JavaScript (most AI crawlers don’t).
Your first citation scan kicks off as soon as you verify your site — so you see real results within minutes, instead of waiting for the weekly run. After that it scans automatically every Monday, and Studio customers also receive daily scans.
Yes — there are a few options for non-WordPress sites:
- Cloudflare Worker (recommended for any site behind Cloudflare) — after verifying your site, download a pre-configured worker script from Settings → Integrations. Deploy it in the Cloudflare Workers dashboard, add a route for your domain, and bot detection and Origin Signal are active with no code changes to your site.
- Server-side snippet (Vercel, Netlify, Node, or any backend you control) — download a pre-configured snippet from the Sites page and drop it into your edge middleware or server. It reports AI crawlers server-side, so it catches the bots a JS snippet can't.
- JS snippet — paste a single script tag into your site's <head>. Works on any platform with no server access required. Catches bots that execute JavaScript; bots that do not execute JS are not captured with this method.
Both options are available in Settings → Integrations after your site is verified.
Unsourced sends prompts to third-party AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Groq, Perplexity) to run citation checks. These prompts contain your site's URL and topic keywords — not your raw page content.
We do not use your data to train any AI model. Unsourced is a consumer of existing AI models, not a trainer. We query them on your behalf, the same way you would if you typed a question into ChatGPT yourself.
All AI providers we use operate under commercial API agreements. For details on how each handles API data, see the sub-processors section of our Privacy Policy.
Indie plan customers can add up to 2 verified sites, Studio up to 4, and Agency up to 10 (with additional sites available at £16/month each). All sites are monitored independently, with separate bot logs, citation reports, and PDF exports for each.
Citation monitoring
Almost certainly not. Zero citations on a first scan — or even after several scans — is the normal state for the majority of independent sites. Most content on the web is not cited by AI assistants. Unsourced surfaces this reality accurately: if your site is not being mentioned, you will see 0. The scan itself is verified by the system; if it ran, the results are real. A result of zero is useful data — it tells you where you stand so you can act on it.
Unsourced checks seven AI models on every weekly scan:
- ChatGPT (training data) — what ChatGPT answers from its training corpus, with no live web access.
- ChatGPT (web search) — ChatGPT with live web search enabled, mirroring what real users see when search is active.
- Claude — checks Anthropic's Claude model.
- Gemini (live Google Search) — Gemini answering with live Google Search results, reflecting the real-time web.
- Grok (xAI) — checks xAI's Grok model.
- Meta Llama — checks Meta's Llama model via Groq.
- Perplexity — checks Perplexity AI's live-search model, which answers queries with live web citations.
Together, these seven models cover both AI training data and the live, AI-augmented search experience your readers are using today.
A citation is recorded when an AI assistant responds to a prompt with a positive, unreserved mention of your domain or site name. Responses that only contain disclaimers ("I don't have information about this site") or negative qualifications do not count. Each citation is logged with a confidence tier, the surrounding response excerpt, and which platform it came from.
Every citation carries a confidence tier: how much evidence we have that the AI actually drew from your content, not just that your name came up.
- Confirmed — strong evidence: a verified AI crawler fetched your page and the answer reproduced your content, or a verbatim phrase from your page appears word-for-word in the response.
- Likely sourced — partial evidence: measurable content overlap, or a citation from a model that searches the live web, suggesting your page informed the answer.
- Mention only — your site or brand was named, but with no corroborating evidence the model used your actual content. A real mention, just unproven sourcing.
Your very first scan runs as soon as you verify a site, so you're not waiting on day one. After that, Indie plans are scanned every Monday, with the weekly digest landing at 9am UK time — fresh data to action for the week ahead. Studio plans add a daily scan on top (it skips any site already scanned that day), plus 4 on-demand scans a month you can trigger from the dashboard.
Reports
Both reports cover the same underlying data. The difference is framing and purpose:
- AI Visibility Audit — structured for content and SEO strategy. Sections cover your citation rate by platform, competitor domains appearing in AI responses, topic performance, and the gap between bots that crawled you and the citations that followed. Includes AI-generated strategic recommendations.
- Evidence Report — structured for legal or licensing contexts. Sections cover bot identity and access logs, page-level crawl evidence, citation results with response excerpts, named competitor domains, verbatim phrase matches, and recommended next steps.
Evidence Reports are provided as structured data to support review, complaint, licensing discussion, or legal escalation where appropriate. They are not a legal determination and do not constitute legal advice.
Yes. From the Reports page, click "Share" to generate a public link valid for 30 days. Recipients can view a summary page and download the PDF without logging in. The shared link can be sent to a solicitor, a licensing contact, or anyone else who needs to review the data.
When generating a report, you can select 30, 90, or 180 days of data. Paid customers have access to 6 months of history; the data is always available within that window. Trial customers have the same access during the 10-day trial period.
Bot monitoring
It's not all-or-nothing. AI crawlers fall into three kinds, and it pays to know which is which before you block anything:
- AI Search — real-time crawlers that cite and link to their sources and can send you referral traffic (ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot). Worth keeping.
- AI Trainers — they gather training data, so you may be cited later from what the model learns (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot). Blocking these can quietly drop you out of future AI answers.
- Scrapers — bulk extraction with no citation benefit, plus any impostor proven to be spoofing a real bot's name (Bytespider and the like). The clearest candidates to block.
The catch: you can't tell which bot is which until you measure. That's what Unsourced is for — it shows you who's visiting, who's citing, and who's just taking, so you can decide who to allow and who to block in your own tools, with evidence instead of guesswork. Unsourced monitors and informs; the decision stays yours.
Origin Signal tells you whether a citation came from an AI that visited your site live during the scan, or from its training data. Live-crawl citations are timestamped and included in your Evidence Report. Training data citations are also recorded — so you have the full picture either way.
The WordPress plugin installs directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory (wordpress.org/plugins/unsourced-ai-bot-monitor). Once connected with your API key from the Settings page, it intercepts incoming requests at the server level and sends bot detection events to Unsourced automatically — including the verified AI-crawler fetches that power the Origin Signal, with no code changes or page edits. This approach captures AI bots that a standard JavaScript beacon cannot — bots that do not execute JavaScript.
The Cloudflare Worker runs at the network edge — before requests reach your server. When an AI crawler visits your site, the worker detects it by user-agent signature, reports the event to Unsourced in the background (using ctx.waitUntil so there is zero latency impact), and lets the original request through unchanged.
It also enables Origin Signal automatically — no code changes needed on your site.
To set it up: go to Settings → Integrations → Cloudflare Worker, download the pre-configured script for your site (credentials are baked in — no environment variables needed), then deploy it in the Cloudflare Workers dashboard and add a route for your domain. Works on Webflow, Framer, Shopify, Ghost, custom stacks — anything behind Cloudflare.
Unsourced detects every major identified AI crawler by user-agent signature, including GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot and anthropic-ai (Anthropic), Google-Extended, GoogleOther, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, CCBot (Common Crawl), Bytespider (ByteDance/TikTok), and Meta-ExternalAgent. New signatures are added as their operators document them publicly.
Yes. The WordPress plugin is the recommended solution for managed WordPress environments (WordPress.com, Kinsta, WP Engine, etc.) where you do not have access to raw server logs. The plugin operates at the PHP level inside WordPress itself, so no server access is required.
Plans and billing
- Indie (£39/month) — for solo publishers & creators: weekly citation scans, up to 50 topics per scan, up to 2 sites, weekly digest email.
- Studio (£89/month) — for full-time creators & small teams: everything in Indie, plus the Citation Gap Report, daily citation scans, 4 on-demand scans per month, up to 200 topics per scan, up to 4 sites, automated citation alerts, and webhook delivery.
- Agency (£199/month) — for agencies & multi-brand teams: everything in Studio, plus up to 10 sites (additional sites £16/month each), up to 500 topics per scan, team seats, and the cross-site Fleet Overview dashboard.
A higher cap means broader topic coverage and more varied prompts per scan.
Yes. You can cancel your subscription at any time from the Settings page via the Stripe customer portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. You retain full access until then. There are no cancellation fees or lock-in periods.
If you experience a technical issue that prevents you from using the service, please contact rene@unsourced.app and we will work to resolve it or provide a fair remedy. We do not offer refunds simply because citation results were lower than expected — zero citations is a valid, accurate result for many sites, not a product failure.
Data and privacy
No. Unsourced doesn't train AI models — we're a consumer of existing models, not a trainer. Your bot logs and citation results are stored only in your account and are never sent to any AI provider. To check citations, we send short generated questions to AI providers through their business APIs; under those providers' API terms, data sent this way is not used to train their models. Full details and our sub-processor list are in our Privacy Policy.
Your account and monitoring data are stored on servers in the European Economic Area (Hetzner, Germany). To check AI citations we also send generated questions to third-party AI providers — some based outside the UK/EEA — under Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). Unsourced is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO, registration ZC150902) and processes data in accordance with UK GDPR. Our full sub-processor list and transfer safeguards are in our Privacy Policy.
Yes. You can permanently delete your account and all associated data from the Settings page. This is irreversible. All data — sites, crawl events, citation events, reports, and account information — is permanently removed in accordance with your rights under UK GDPR Article 17.
Still have questions?
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