GEO & AI search

AI-referred traffic

Definition

Website sessions that arrive by a click from an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot, identified by the referrer the assistant passes. It excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, which GA4 counts as Organic Search, and it misses AI visits whose referrer was stripped, which land in Direct.

Defined in Does AI-Referred Traffic Convert? What the Evidence Actually Says.

Where AI-referred traffic comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

AI Overviews: The AI-generated summary Google shows at the top of some regular search results pages, with links to the sources it draws on. Search Console treats an AI Overview as a single position on the results page: every link inside it gets that same position.
AI Mode: Google Search's conversational mode, launched in the U.S. on May 20, 2025. Google describes it as using a "query fan-out" technique that breaks a question into subtopics and searches each one. In Search Console, a follow-up question in AI Mode counts as a new query.
Organic Search: The GA4 default channel for unpaid search clicks. A session lands here when its source is on Google's list of search sites or its medium is exactly "organic". Google's definition says it includes AI Overviews and AI Mode.
AI-attributed revenue: Purchase revenue from sessions whose source GA4 can identify as an AI assistant, using last-click attribution within the session. It excludes purchases influenced by AI answers that arrived through Organic Search, Direct or another channel, so it understates AI's total effect.
AI Assistant channel: A channel in GA4's default channel group for visits from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok. Its rule is that the medium exactly matches ai-assistant. GA4 sets that medium, and the campaign (ai-assistant), when the referrer matches Google's list of AI assistants. Google says the channel excludes its own AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Custom channel group: A copy of GA4's default channel group that you can edit: add channels, change conditions and reorder them. Traffic goes to the first channel whose definition it matches. Standard properties can have two custom groups, 360 properties five, each with up to 50 channels. Google says custom groups can be applied to reports retroactively.

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What is AI invisibility costing you?

Revenue at risk from AI shopping channels, with the formula shown so you can check the maths.

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