Manual setup

How it works

Send your request logs to ByDefault from anywhere.

In ByDefault, open Analytics, click Connect your site, then pick Manual setup. It has your API key and tells you when your first event arrives.

Send your request logs

Send your HTTP request logs from your server like this:

POST https://www.bydefault.so/api/ingest/http
Content-Type: application/json
X-API-Key: bd_…

The API key is your token from the setup. Send up to 1,000 events in one request as a JSON array, and up to 4 MB per request.

Format each event

[
  {
    // ISO 8601.
    "timestamp": "2026-10-23T09:12:00.000Z",
    "status_code": 200,
    "request_method": "GET",
    "request_path": "/pricing",
    // Nullable.
    "query_string": null,
    "content_type": "text/html",
    // Spoof check against the provider's official IP ranges. Not stored.
    "client_ip": "203.0.113.7",
    "hostname": "example.com",
    // How AI assistants are recognized. Copy it verbatim from the request.
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0)",
    // Nullable.
    "referrer": "https://www.google.com/"
  }
]

Every event needs every property. query_string and referrer can be null, and timestamp must be within the last 72 hours. You don't need to filter for AI traffic, since ByDefault does that. Just skip static assets like images, scripts and fonts.

client_ip is required because ByDefault checks each event against the provider's official IP ranges, so fake crawlers don't count. IPs are never stored, and events that aren't AI traffic are discarded.

The response says what happened to each event:

{
  "success": true,
  "details": {
    "outcome": { "received": 1, "accepted": 0, "dropped": 1 },
    "results": [
      {
        "index": 0,
        "status": "dropped",
        "reason": "ip_mismatch",
        // Real traffic from ClaudeBot would be accepted
        "detail": "client_ip is outside the operator's published IP ranges for claudebot"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Send only AI traffic

If your request volume or data policy calls for filtering on your side, send only requests whose User-Agent matches one of these, case-insensitive:

GPTBot|OAI-SearchBot|ChatGPT-User|OAI-AdsBot|ClaudeBot|Claude-User|Claude-SearchBot|Claude-Web|anthropic-ai|ShapBot|PerplexityBot|Perplexity-User|meta-webindexer|meta-externalagent|meta-externalfetcher|FacebookBot|MistralAI-User|MistralAI-Index

Check the connection

While the setup is open, ByDefault visits your site the way an AI assistant would, every few seconds. Its visits identify as Claude-User. Once your pipeline sends one of them to ByDefault, the last step turns green.

Troubleshooting