Is AI already sending you visitors?
Assistant referrals arrive in analytics as ordinary referral traffic, filed next to newsletters and forum links. Almost nobody segments them out, which is why almost nobody knows their number. It is usually small and growing fast, and it usually converts better than everything else in the report — because the visitor did not find a list of ten options, they were handed one.
Nobody can measure your traffic from outside. Including us.
Readiness
Whether AI engines can reach, read and resolve your site. Measured from outside during the audit, with nothing installed and no permission needed.
Traffic
Whether people actually arrived from an assistant. That fact exists in your server logs and your analytics, and nowhere else. A tool that shows you an "AI traffic" number without touching either is showing you a model's estimate, not your traffic.
Pull it out of GA4 in about two minutes
We get no data from this at all, which is the point. If your analytics already has the answer, you should not have to add anything to get it.
Open Explore
In Google Analytics 4, go to Explore and create a blank exploration.
Set the dimension
Add the dimension Session source (or Session source / medium if you want to see the medium too).
Set the metric
Add Sessions, and Key events if you have conversions configured — the conversion rate is the number that matters here.
Filter it
Add a filter: Session source matches regex, and paste the pattern below.
Set the range
Last 12 months. This traffic grows month over month, and a single month tells you nothing about the trend.
Read it
Compare the conversion rate of these sessions against your site average. In most accounts it is materially higher — a visitor arriving from an assistant has already been told you are the answer.
The regex to paste
chatgpt|openai|perplexity|gemini|copilot|claude\.ai|grok|you\.com|poe\.com|phind|mistral|deepseek|kagi|meta\.ai
Or match these hosts explicitly if you prefer a list to a pattern:
chat.openai.com chatgpt.com claude.ai copilot.microsoft.com deepseek.com gemini.google.com grok.com kagi.com meta.ai mistral.ai perplexity.ai phind.com poe.com you.com
The tracker, if you would rather not touch GA4
Free with every check. You get an unguessable dashboard URL — there is nothing to log into and nothing to configure.
What it records
The referring host, the path landed on, and the date. That is the complete list.
What it does not record
No cookies. No local storage. No IP address. No user agent. No visitor identifier. No third-party request. If the referrer is not an AI assistant, the script exits without sending anything at all.
Where it runs
Loaded async, wrapped in a try/catch, and it cannot break your page. About fifteen lines, and readable — open the script URL and check for yourself before pasting it.
How to get one
Run a free check on your domain and enter your email to unlock the report. The tracker snippet and your dashboard link are on that page.
The assistants that send identifiable referrals
These arrive in analytics as ordinary referrals. The whole trick is knowing which hosts to look for.
| Source | Type | Note |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Assistant | OpenAI. Usually the largest single source, and usually the one nobody has noticed. |
| Perplexity | AI search | Cites sources by default, so its referrals are the clearest signal that you were quoted rather than merely read. |
| Google Gemini | Assistant | Gemini's own surface. AI Overviews inside Google Search are separate and are not distinguishable in referrer data. |
| Microsoft Copilot | Assistant | Reads the Bing index — if Bing has not indexed you, Copilot cannot cite you. |
| Claude | Assistant | Anthropic. Cites sources when browsing is used. |
| Grok | Assistant | xAI. |
| You.com | AI search | AI search. |
| Poe | Assistant | Quora's assistant hub. |
| Phind | AI search | Developer-focused. Worth watching if you sell to engineers. |
| Mistral Le Chat | Assistant | Le Chat. |
| DeepSeek | Assistant | — |
| Kagi | AI search | Paid search with an assistant. Small volume, unusually high intent. |
| Andi | AI search | — |
| Meta AI | Assistant | — |
| Arc Search | AI search | — |
What this number cannot tell you
Stated up front, because every one of these is somewhere a competitor would quietly give you a number instead.
Google AI Overviews cannot be separated.
Clicks from an AI Overview inside Google Search carry a plain google.com referrer, identical to a blue-link click. Any tool that reports an AI Overview traffic number is estimating it. We would rather show you nothing than a number we invented.
Zero is a real answer, and a common one.
Most sites we check have no assistant referrals at all yet. That is information: it means the readiness work has not paid out yet, or has not been done. It does not mean the tracker is broken.
An assistant that reads you without linking you leaves no trace here.
Being summarised without a click is the normal case, not the exception. Referral data is the floor of your AI visibility, never the ceiling — the answer-engine tracking on the paid tiers is what measures the part that never clicks.
This counts visits, not citations.
A referral proves a person clicked through. It does not tell you which question was asked or which page was quoted, and we will not pretend to reconstruct either.
Start with the audit.
Traffic follows readiness. If engines cannot read you, there is nothing for the tracker to count yet.