More people now ask an AI assistant before they search. When the answer cites one of your pages, some of them click the link and land on your site. They are ordinary visitors and you can count them, but most analytics setups file them in the wrong place.
This post covers people who click through from an answer. The crawlers that read your page to write that answer are a separate problem, covered in Your analytics cannot see AI crawlers.
How an AI visit shows up
Your analytics learns where a visit came from in two ways.
The first is the referrer. When someone clicks a link on chatgpt.com, their browser usually tells your site which page sent them.
The second is a UTM tag, a label added to the end of the link itself. ChatGPT adds
utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it cites, so the source survives even when the referrer is
stripped.
Some visits carry neither. A link copied out of an answer and pasted into a new tab arrives with nothing, and so do clicks from some desktop and mobile apps. No tool can recover those, and they land in Direct. Treat any AI number as a floor.
In GA4
Since May 2026, GA4's default channel group has an AI Assistant channel. Google's definition names ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok. It leaves out Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode on purpose, so clicks from those stay in Organic Search.
Assistants that are not on Google's list fall through to Referral. Perplexity and Claude are the two you are most likely to see there.
To put them in one place, make your own channel group:
- Go to Admin → Data display → Channel groups and copy the default group.
- Add a channel called "AI assistants" with the condition Source matches regex:
chatgpt|openai|perplexity|claude|gemini|copilot|deepseek|grok|meta\.ai|mistral - Drag it above Referral. GA4 checks channels from the top down, so a rule below Referral never gets a chance to match.
- Pick the new group in your acquisition reports.
In Spreelytics
AI is its own channel from the first visit, with nothing to set up. It covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, Le Chat, You.com, Poe and Phind.
Gemini needs special care, because its address sits on google.com. We match it before the Google rule runs, so Gemini visits do not get folded into Organic Search.
To read it, open Web analytics and pick AI in the Channels tab of the Acquisition card. You see which assistant sent each visit. Click one to filter the whole page to it, including the landing pages those visitors arrived on.
If you have connected Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy, the AI channel also carries the revenue it earned. That answers the question that matters more than the visit count, which is whether people who come from an answer go on to buy. See Revenue for the setup.
Compare it with search
A count of AI visits tells you little on its own. Put it next to Organic Search over the same date range, and compare how often each channel's visitors complete a goal.
Someone who clicks through from an answer has usually read a summary of you already. So a channel that sends few visits can still convert well, and the conversion rate is the number to watch.
What the numbers will not show
Two things stay out of reach for every tool.
Visits with no referrer and no tag are counted as Direct. Nothing in the request says where they came from.
People who read the answer and never click are not visitors at all. You can still see how often assistants fetch your pages while answering questions. The AI answers tab on the Bots page counts exactly that, using a small server middleware. See AI crawlers and bots. ChatGPT's fetches come from ChatGPT-User, not GPTBot, which is OpenAI's training crawler. The AI crawler list has the other assistants' fetchers.