Citelayer® CSV Export — Download Your Bot & Referral Data

3 min read

Updated Mar 19, 2026

Exporting Your Bot Analytics Data

Citelayer® stores all AI bot visit data locally on your server. The CSV export lets you pull that data out as a flat file for use in Excel, Google Sheets, data analysis tools, or any other system that accepts CSV input.

The export is available under Citelayer® → Bot Analytics → CSV Export. Click the Download CSV button to export with default settings, or use the filter options to narrow the export to a specific bot or date range before downloading.

Export Filters

Before exporting, you can apply optional filters:

Bot name — Filter to a single bot’s visits. Select a bot name from the dropdown to export only that bot’s records. Leave blank to export all bots.

Date range — Specify a start date and/or end date to limit the export. Dates use the YYYY-MM-DD format. You can specify just a start date (all records from that date forward), just an end date (all records up to that date), or both.

The export URL structure reflects your filter choices. If you’re building an automated export workflow, you can construct the URL directly:

https://yoursite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?citelayer_export_bot_csv=1&_wpnonce=NONCE&bot=GPTBot&from=2026-01-01&to=2026-03-31

Replace NONCE with a valid WordPress nonce. The export always requires a valid nonce and an authenticated user with manage_options capability — it is not publicly accessible.

CSV Columns

Each row in the export file represents one bot visit. The columns are:

Column	Description
Date/Time	UTC timestamp of the visit (format: `YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS`)
Bot Name	Identified bot name (e.g., `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`)
Category	Bot category: `confirmed_ai` or `possible_ai`
URL Path	The path that was visited (e.g., `/blog/my-post/`)
IP Address	IP address of the bot, if IP logging was enabled at the time of the visit. Empty if IP logging was off.

Export Limits

Each export is capped at 10,000 rows. This limit exists as a memory safety measure — very large result sets can exhaust PHP memory limits, especially on shared hosting. The limit applies to the filtered result set, so if you filter to a specific date range and the result is under 10,000 rows, you get all matching records.

If you need more than 10,000 records, split the export by date range. For example, export one month at a time and concatenate the files in your spreadsheet tool.

File Naming

Exported files are named automatically:

citelayer-bot-analytics-YYYY-MM-DD-HHmmss.csv

The timestamp in the filename reflects when the export was generated, which makes it easy to track when a particular snapshot was taken if you save multiple exports over time.

What to Do With the Data

A few practical uses:

Trend analysis — Import multiple monthly exports into a spreadsheet and chart visit volume over time. This gives you a longer-term view than the 90-day window in the dashboard.

Content auditing — Filter by URL path to see which pages a specific bot has visited. Useful for checking whether newly published content is being picked up.

Reporting — If you report on AI visibility to clients or stakeholders, a CSV export is easier to share than screenshots of the dashboard.

For live data and visual dashboards, stay in the Bot Analytics interface. The CSV export is for when you need to take the data somewhere else.