Start with visits that reached your website
A recommendation becomes measurable website traffic only when someone follows a link and your analytics tag records the visit. A browser may provide the referring domain, such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. Visitor Tracking groups a reviewed list of these domains into the AI referrals report.
The report uses the same cookieless visitor definition as your other analytics. Its overall visitor total is calculated across matching activity. The source table counts visitors separately for each domain, so someone arriving through two assistants can appear in two rows.
- Install the tracking tag and verify a real pageview.
- Open your website and choose AI referrals under Growth.
- Choose a complete date range, such as the previous month.
- Inspect the domain rows, explore a source in the main dashboard, or download the CSV.
Why some AI visits look like direct traffic
Referrer information depends on the source application, browser and link behaviour. An app can open a browser without passing an origin. A person can copy a link into another tab. Referrer policy can restrict what is sent. These arrivals may look direct even when an assistant helped the person find you.
Do not relabel all direct traffic as AI traffic. Direct includes many unrelated journeys. When you control a link in an owned assistant or resource, a clearly labelled UTM link can add context, but a campaign label is still an observation rather than proof of causality.
Keep traffic, citations and visibility separate
A citation without a click is not a website visit. A recorded visit does not reveal the user’s prompt, the full answer they saw, or your position among cited sources. Dedicated monitoring services can sample prompts, but those samples are a different measurement with their own limits.
General Google and Bing referrer domains do not reliably separate AI answer clicks from ordinary search clicks in this report. We leave those domains out of the assistant-only view rather than presenting ordinary search traffic as confirmed AI referrals. Search-platform reporting can provide additional evidence where available.
Give people something useful to reference
A tool that completes a real task, a worked example and a clear explanation of limitations are useful to readers regardless of how they arrive. We publish interactive tools alongside readable instructions, formulas and source links. The explanatory content is available in the page HTML, so it does not depend on a crawler completing a form.
Google’s guidance keeps ordinary SEO fundamentals central to AI discovery: useful original content, crawlable pages and a good experience. It also cautions against manufacturing pages for every query variant. There is no special text file or markup that guarantees inclusion. Measure actual landing visits and useful actions instead of treating eligibility as visibility.