How to track AI referral traffic to your website

AI assistants increasingly send real visitors to websites, but that traffic hides in your analytics unless you look for it. Referrals arrive from hosts like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and others — sometimes as a referrer, sometimes stripped to direct. To measure it, segment your analytics by those referral domains, watch for sudden direct-traffic growth that correlates with content you have made answer-ready, and if you run campaigns, tag any links you place on AI-read sources. Tracking this matters because AI referral visitors tend to arrive high-intent and far down the decision — they have already been told you are a good option. Knowing which assistants send them tells you where your visibility work is actually paying off.

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