How to see ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI traffic in your analytics

Visitors who click a link in an AI assistant’s answer arrive with a referrer from the assistant’s site, such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or claude.ai. ChatGPT also adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of its links. In Google Analytics 4 you can group all of these into an “AI assistants” channel, so they stop hiding under “Referral” or “Direct”.

Two different things: AI bots and AI visitors

It helps to keep these apart:

• AI bots are programs: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User and so on. They don’t run JavaScript, so Google Analytics never sees them. You can only see them in server logs or with a server-side tool. See GPTBot vs ChatGPT-User vs OAI-SearchBot.
• AI visitors are people who read an AI answer and clicked through to your site. They use a normal browser, so analytics can see them, if you know where to look.

This guide is about the second group.

Where AI visitors come from

These can change, so check now and then which new sources appear in your reports.

Find them in Google Analytics 4 (quick look)

1. Open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
2. Change the main dimension to Session source.
3. Search the table for chatgpt, perplexity, claude, gemini and copilot.

That shows you the numbers today, but you’d have to repeat it every time.

Make a permanent “AI assistants” channel

GA4 lets you create your own channel group:

1. Go to Admin → Data display → Channel groups and create a new channel group (copy the default one so your other channels keep working).
2. Add a channel called AI assistants.
3. Set its condition to Source matches regex, with:

chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|perplexity|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|chat\.deepseek\.com|chat\.mistral\.ai

1. Move AI assistants above Referral in the list. Channels are matched from the top, so otherwise these visits land in Referral first.
2. Save, then pick your new channel group in the Traffic acquisition report.

The new group also applies to past data, so you can see the trend straight away.

Why some AI traffic still hides

Even with a perfect setup, part of the AI traffic shows up as Direct:

• Apps. Links opened from the ChatGPT or Perplexity mobile and desktop apps often arrive with no referrer at all.
• Copied links. People copy a URL from an answer and paste it into a new tab.
• Privacy settings. Some browsers and extensions strip referrers.

So treat your AI number as a minimum. If your direct traffic to deep pages (not your homepage) rises at the same time as your AI referrals, much of that is probably AI too.

Connect visits to what the AI read

The most useful question isn’t just “how many people came from ChatGPT?”, but “which pages do AI assistants read, and which ones do they send people to?”. Analytics only shows the second half, because the bots that read your pages are invisible to it.

OZMAICO shows both: the verified AI bots that read each page, and the people who then arrive from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot on that same page. It works with a one-line JavaScript tag or your server log, and it’s free.

Quick checklist

• Create the AI assistants channel in GA4 and move it above Referral.
• Look at landing pages for that channel: these are the pages AI recommends.
• Watch Direct traffic to deep pages as a hint of hidden AI traffic.
• Measure the bots too: see which AI crawlers read those pages, and whether they are real or fake.