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name: ai-referral-analysis description: "Measure traffic arriving from AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and others — and understand how it behaves compared to other channels."

AI Referral Analysis

Measure traffic arriving from AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and others — and understand how it behaves compared to other channels.

When to use

• You want to quantify how much of your traffic comes from AI assistants
• You're tracking whether AI-driven discovery is growing over time
• You want to compare AI referral quality (engagement, conversion) to SEO or direct

Known AI referral sources

These domains appear as sessionSource in GA4 when users click links from AI tools:

Tool	Source domains
ChatGPT	chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com
Claude	claude.ai
Perplexity	perplexity.ai
Gemini	gemini.google.com
Copilot	copilot.microsoft.com, bing.com (when AI-driven)
You.com	you.com
Grok	grok.x.ai, x.com

Step 1 — Volume and trend

dimensions: ["date", "sessionSource"]
metrics: ["sessions", "newUsers", "userEngagementDuration", "screenPageViews"]
dimension_filter: sessionSource contains "chatgpt.com" OR "perplexity.ai" OR
                  "claude.ai" OR "gemini.google.com" OR "copilot.microsoft.com"
date_range: last 30–90 days

Use date as a dimension to see the growth trend.

Step 2 — Quality comparison

Compare AI referral quality against your other top channels:

dimensions: ["sessionDefaultChannelGroup", "sessionSource"]
metrics: ["sessions", "userEngagementDuration", "screenPageViewsPerSession",
          "keyEvents", "bounceRate"]
date_range: last 30 days

Then filter the results to AI sources and compare engagement metrics against Organic Search and Direct.

Step 3 — Which pages AI drives traffic to

dimensions: ["sessionSource", "landingPage"]
metrics: ["sessions", "userEngagementDuration", "keyEvents"]
dimension_filter: sessionSource contains "chatgpt.com" OR "perplexity.ai" OR "claude.ai"
date_range: last 30 days
order_by: sessions DESC

This shows which content AI tools are citing and sending users to.

What to report

• AI referral as % of total sessions (and % of total new users)
• Month-over-month growth rate for AI referral traffic
• Engagement quality: AI vs Organic Search (userEngagementDuration, keyEvents)
• Top landing pages receiving AI referral traffic
• Which AI tool sends the most traffic