See the visitors AI sends you.

To track traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI tools, check three places. Your analytics shows the visits: Google Analytics now files visits from many assistants under an AI Assistant channel, and ChatGPT tags its links with utm_source=chatgpt.com. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools show how often Google’s and Microsoft’s AI answers show or cite your pages, and your server logs show which pages assistants read.

None of these sees everything. Clicks from Google’s AI Overviews look like ordinary Google clicks, and many AI answers never produce a click at all. So add a monthly check of the answers themselves, run enough times to mean something.

01What can you measure about AI traffic?

Four signals show up in tools, each in a different one, and a fifth shows up only in the answers themselves. Mixing them up is the most common mistake in AI traffic reports.

The last row matters more than it looks. Assistants often name a brand from memory, with no link and no visit, and no report counts that.

02How do I see ChatGPT traffic in Google Analytics?

Open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and find the AI Assistant row. Since May 13, 2026, Google Analytics gives visits a medium of ai-assistant and a campaign of (ai-assistant) when the referrer matches Google’s list of assistants.

The channel has limits you need to know. Google’s channel definition names “ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot, or Grok” as examples. Its announcement names ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Neither page names Perplexity, and Google does not publish the full list. The channel also “excludes Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode”, which stay in organic search.

1. 01

   Open Traffic acquisition

   In Google Analytics 4, go to Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition. Set a date range of at least 28 days, because AI visits are usually a small slice.

2. 02

   Read the AI Assistant row

   It shows sessions, engagement and key events for the visits Google recognized. Compare it with Organic Search, not with your total.

3. 03

   Switch the table to Session source

   This shows the actual sources, such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. It is the simplest way to see which assistants landed in Referral instead.

4. 04

   Add a custom channel if an assistant is missing

   Go to Admin, Data display, Channel groups, and create a new group. Add a channel with a “Source matches regex” condition and drag it above Referral, because traffic goes to the first channel it matches. A standard property can have two custom groups, and they apply to past data too.

Be careful with Google’s own example for that custom channel. Its help page suggests this regular expression:

^.*ai|.*\.openai.*|.*chatgpt.*|.*gemini.*|.*gpt.*|.*copilot.*|.*perplexity.*|.*google.*bard.*|.*bard.*google.*|.*bard.*|.*.*gemini.*google.*$

We tested it against 22 sample sources in Python, which matches the whole value the way Google Analytics does. It counted some-startup.ai, example.ai and gptzero.me as AI assistants, because any source ending in “ai” or containing “gpt” matches. It missed chat.deepseek.com and grok.com. A list of exact hosts did better:

(chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|(www\.)?perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|chat\.deepseek\.com|grok\.com|(www\.)?meta\.ai|chat\.mistral\.ai)

counted as AI: chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, www.perplexity.ai, claude.ai,
               gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, chat.deepseek.com, grok.com,
               meta.ai, chat.mistral.ai
not counted:   google, bing, mail.google.com, news.ycombinator.com, t.co, l.facebook.com,
               gptzero.me, some-startup.ai, example.ai, docs.github.com, (direct)

With Google’s example, a link to you from any site on a .ai domain counts as an AI assistant visit.

03Which referrers and utm_source values do AI assistants send?

ChatGPT is the only one we found documented: OpenAI says it “automatically includes the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com in referral URLs.” The other assistants show up, if at all, by the address of the web app the click came from.

Checked on September 28, 2026:

The GA columns come from Google’s channel definitions and its May 2026 announcement. The hosts are simply where each assistant’s web app runs. A click from a phone app can arrive with no referrer at all, and analytics then files it as Direct. That is why ChatGPT’s utm tag is so useful: it survives when the referrer does not.

04How do I see AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console?

Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode sit inside the normal Performance report, under the “Web” search type, mixed with regular results. Their impressions have a report of their own: the Generative AI performance report, rolled out to all websites on August 31, 2026.

What the report shows, checked on September 28, 2026 in Google’s help pages:

• Impressions only, for AI Overviews and AI Mode. No clicks.

• By page, country, device and date. Pages are grouped by canonical URL.

• Nothing until you have enough impressions. Google gives no threshold.

• No Search Labs experiments. Those are excluded.

You can open it directly at search.google.com/search-console/performance/search-analytics/ai. In the regular Performance report, Google counts an AI Overview as a single position, and every link inside it gets that position. A click on one of those links counts as a click, and in AI Mode a follow-up question counts as a new query.

The same Search Console now has a switch, Settings, then Search generative AI, that can exclude your site from these features. It is on Include by default. Our AI crawlers list explains how it differs from blocking crawlers.

05How do I see Copilot citations in Bing Webmaster Tools?

Open the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. It counts how often Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and “select partner AI integrations” cite your pages, and it has been in public preview since February 10, 2026.

Checked on September 28, 2026, in Bing’s help page:

Two caveats come from Bing itself. The data “represents a sample of overall citation activity”, so small numbers may not appear. And a citation “does not represent traffic, clicks, or user engagement.”

06What do server logs show that analytics cannot?

Server logs show when an assistant reads your page, even when nobody clicks. Most bots do not run the scripts analytics tools rely on, so these fetches rarely show up there.

The useful ones are the user-triggered fetchers: ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User and MistralAI-User, among others. Each visit means an assistant fetched your page because someone asked about it. This counts them per page:

grep -E "ChatGPT-User|Claude-User|Perplexity-User|MistralAI-User|DuckAssistBot" access.log \
  | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

   3 /blog/pricing-guide
   1 /blog/setup-checklist

The same log also holds the human visits that assistants sent. This finds them by utm tag or referrer:

grep -E "utm_source=chatgpt\.com|\"https://(chatgpt\.com|(www\.)?perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com)/" access.log \
  | awk '{print $7, $11}'

/blog/pricing-guide?utm_source=chatgpt.com "-"
/blog/setup-checklist "https://www.perplexity.ai/"
/blog/pricing-guide "https://gemini.google.com/"

Treat fetch counts as a floor, since an assistant can answer from its search index without fetching the page again. And since anyone can fake a user agent, verify the addresses before you report numbers. Our AI crawlers list shows how, with each vendor’s IP list.

07How do I check AI answers by hand without fooling myself?

Ask the questions your customers ask, the way they ask them, in each assistant, many times, and count how often your site is cited. A single run is close to useless, because answers change from run to run.

Two studies explain the rules. In a vendor study, Graphite, an SEO and AI search agency, ran 100 comparison prompts 100 times each in logged-out ChatGPT in August 2026. Unforced answers searched the web 58% of the time. Forcing search on prompts that normally don’t search raised brand visibility by about 20 points, so never force search in a tracking prompt.

A 2026 paper, Don’t Measure Once, makes the case for treating visibility as a range, not a single reading.

How many runs is enough? We computed the 95% range for a site cited 30% of the time:

cited in  3 of  10 runs:   30%  (95% range  11% to  60%)
cited in  6 of  20 runs:   30%  (95% range  15% to  52%)
cited in 15 of  50 runs:   30%  (95% range  19% to  44%)
cited in 30 of 100 runs:   30%  (95% range  22% to  40%)

With 10 runs, a real rate anywhere from 11% to 60% fits the data. Aim for at least 20 runs per question per assistant before you compare months.

[The exact question a customer would ask, in their words]

Log each run in a sheet with these columns: date, assistant, logged in or out, question, whether it searched, whether you were cited, whether you were named without a link, and which competitors appeared. The question stays identical every month. That is what makes the trend readable.

08A monthly AI traffic routine

If you are deciding where AI search fits in your wider plan, our AI marketing playbook covers the rest of the funnel. For what to change when a page is not being cited, see how to get cited by AI search.

09FAQ

Next, see which AI crawlers to allow, or how clicks changed in SEO in the age of AI.