How to track traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants

When ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini cite a page, people click. For many sites this is still a small share of traffic, but it grows quickly and often converts well. The problem: most analytics tools lump it into "referrals" or "direct", so you don't see it.

Where AI traffic comes from

The most common sources and the domains they appear as:

ChatGPT also adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of the links it shows, so part of its traffic arrives with a UTM tag even when the referrer is missing. For your own links — in newsletters, posts or ads — you can add tags the same way with our free UTM builder.

Why some AI traffic looks like "direct"

• Mobile and desktop apps often open links without sending a referrer.
• Copy-paste: people copy a URL from the chat and paste it into the browser.
• Privacy settings in some browsers strip the referrer.

So whatever tool you use, the AI share you see is a lower bound. A growing "direct" share on pages that are cited in AI answers is a hint that part of it is AI traffic.

How to see it in Google Analytics 4

GA4 classifies most of these visits as Referral. To see them as one channel:

1. Go to Admin → Data display → Channel groups and create a custom channel group.
2. Add a channel "AI assistants" with the condition Source matches regex and a pattern such as chatgpt|openai|perplexity|claude|gemini|copilot|deepseek|giga\.chat|alice\.yandex.
3. Move it above the Referral channel so it takes priority.
4. Use the new channel group in the Traffic acquisition report.

Custom channel groups apply to reports going forward, so keep the regex up to date as new assistants appear.

How to see it in LightMetrica

In LightMetrica, AI assistants are a separate source type out of the box — no regex, no setup. You see:

• the AI share of all visits on the dashboard;
• which assistant sent each visit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Alice, GigaChat…);
• which pages AI visitors land on and how they behave — bounce rate, depth, time on site, goals.

The weekly Smart Report also flags notable changes and suggests what to do about them, e.g. "visits from AI assistants doubled, mostly to your pricing page".

What to do with the data

• Find your cited pages. Landing pages of AI visitors are the pages assistants recommend. Keep them accurate and up to date.
• Compare conversion. If AI visitors convert better than search visitors, it is worth making those pages even more quotable: clear definitions, comparison tables, concrete numbers.
• Watch the trend, not the absolute number. Because part of AI traffic hides as direct, the direction over weeks is more reliable than a single figure.

You can see how this looks on real data in our live stats.