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AI Assistants

Track and analyze traffic coming from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini.

Overview

When AI assistants answer questions, they increasingly cite and link to websites — and people click those links. Ghost Metrics classifies these visitors into a dedicated AI Assistant referrer channel, so you can see how much of your traffic starts inside an AI conversation.

Find the report under Acquisition → AI Assistants. The AI Assistant channel also appears alongside Search Engines, Social Networks, Websites, Campaigns, and Direct Entry in Acquisition → All Channels.

What Gets Classified

Visits are attributed to an AI assistant when the visitor arrives with a referrer from a recognized assistant domain. Recognized assistants include:

  • ChatGPT (chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com)
  • Perplexity (perplexity.ai)
  • Microsoft Copilot (copilot.microsoft.com)
  • Google Gemini (gemini.google.com)
  • Claude (claude.ai)
  • Meta AI, Le Chat (Mistral), Grok, DeepSeek, You.com, and others

The list of recognized assistants is maintained centrally and grows as new assistants appear.

Why Track AI Referrals?

Measure a Growing Channel

  • How much of your traffic starts in an AI conversation?
  • Which assistants send you the most visitors?
  • Is AI referral traffic growing quarter over quarter?

Understand What AI Surfaces

  • Which landing pages do AI-referred visitors arrive on? (Apply the AI segment to Entry Pages)
  • Does AI-referred traffic convert — appointments requested, forms completed?

Content Strategy

  • Content that AI assistants cite tends to be clear, factual, and well-structured
  • Compare AI-referred landing pages against your priority service lines

Segmenting AI Traffic

Use a segment to view any report through the AI lens:

  1. Open the segment editor at the top of any report
  2. Add the condition Channel Type → Is → AI Assistant
  3. Save the segment (e.g., “AI-referred visitors”)

Now you can see the pages AI visitors read, their conversion rates, and their locations — in any report. To analyze a single assistant, segment on Referrer URL → Contains (e.g., perplexity.ai).

The Dark-Traffic Caveat

AI referral attribution only works when the browser sends a referrer. In practice, a large share of AI-driven visits arrive without one:

  • Clicks from native apps (the ChatGPT desktop/mobile apps, Copilot in Windows) usually carry no referrer
  • Links copied and pasted from an AI conversation arrive as direct traffic
  • Some assistants strip referrer information

Those visits land in Direct Entry, so treat the AI Assistants report as a floor, not a census. One helpful signal: some assistants append campaign parameters to outbound links (for example, utm_source=chatgpt.com), so AI-driven visits may also surface in your Campaigns reports — worth checking both.

AI Crawlers and Agents (Bot Traffic)

Separate from humans clicking AI citations, AI systems themselves fetch your content — crawlers gathering training data and agents reading pages to answer questions. These bots don’t run JavaScript, so they never appear in your standard reports.

Ghost Metrics can measure this activity too, via server-side telemetry: request data ingested from your CDN or platform (Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or WordPress integrations). Once configured, dedicated AI Chatbots reports show which AI systems request your content and how often — alongside, but never mixed into, your human visit metrics.

Setting up telemetry ingestion involves your hosting/CDN configuration — contact support if you’d like this enabled.

Healthcare Considerations

For healthcare websites, AI visibility has extra weight:

Patient Information

AI assistants surface your health content in answers. Ensure:

  • Medical information is accurate and up-to-date
  • Content includes appropriate disclaimers
  • Information is presented responsibly

Provider Discovery

AI assistants increasingly help people find healthcare providers. Optimize:

  • Provider profile pages
  • Location and contact information
  • Services and specialties content

Measure What Matters

Apply your AI segment to Goals reports: are AI-referred visitors requesting appointments? That’s the number that justifies (or redirects) your AI-visibility efforts.

Limitations

  • Only visits arriving after the AI Assistant channel was introduced are classified this way — older visits remain in the channels they were originally recorded under (typically Websites or Direct)
  • Referrer-less AI traffic appears as Direct Entry (see the dark-traffic caveat above)
  • AI crawler/agent activity requires the separate telemetry setup — it isn’t visible through the JavaScript tracker
  • New assistants are recognized as the shared assistant list is updated

Next Steps

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