How to track visitors from ChatGPT and other AI assistants

AI assistants are a new traffic source

When an AI assistant answers a question, it often links to the pages it used. People click those links — and for many websites this is now a noticeable, fast-growing source of visitors, especially for guides, tools and product pages.

The question is how much of your traffic comes from AI, and which pages it lands on.

How AI traffic is recognised

When someone clicks a link in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, the browser usually tells your website where the visitor came from (the referrer), for example chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. Some assistants also add a campaign tag such as utm_source=chatgpt.com to the link.

Our analytics reads both and puts these visits in their own AI assistants channel, next to search, social, email and referrals. Each assistant is listed by name: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI, Mistral and more.

Why some AI traffic looks like direct traffic

Not every AI app sends a referrer. Desktop and mobile apps in particular often open links without one, so those visits appear as direct traffic. Two tips:

• Watch for direct traffic landing on deep pages (a long blog post rather than your home page) — that is often AI or messaging apps.
• Compare trends: if AI traffic and direct traffic to the same pages grow together, part of that direct traffic is probably AI too.

Where to look in your dashboard

1. In the Sources card, open the Channels tab and find AI assistants, or open the AI assistants tab to see each assistant by name. Compare with the previous period to see the trend.
2. Click the channel to filter the whole dashboard. Now Top pages shows which pages AI assistants send people to.
3. Add a goal (for example a sign-up or purchase) to see how AI visitors convert compared with search visitors.

How to get more AI traffic

• Answer questions directly. Clear headings and a short, direct answer near the top make your page easy to quote.
• Keep facts current. Prices, versions and dates that are out of date are less likely to be cited.
• Be the original source. Unique data, examples and tools get linked more than rewritten summaries.
• Let crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt doesn't block the AI crawlers you want to be found by.

AI search is still young. Measuring it now means you'll see the trend early — and know which content earns those visits.