How To Track AI Traffic in GA4 (Step-by-Step)

Traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini still a relatively small proportion of all website traffic. For example, this data from Content Square for financial services shows that AI referred traffic is still just 0.13% of all traffic, but that has grown from 0.03% in just a year. And that's a similar pattern for other industries like services, software, manufacturing. And the really exciting thing is while this segment is growing quickly, it's also very high performing. And it's not uncommon to see cases like this where traffic from ChatGPT converting at like 6%. Ahrefs last year posted this blog saying that 12.1% of their sign-ups came from AI search despite AI search only contributing 0.5% of their traffic. And this data from Apollo found that traffic converted much better than Google, four to five times better than Google with an average conversion rate of 14.2% in this industry. So, while AI traffic to your website might still be relatively small, it can be very high intent and very good quality. So, today we're going to look at how to track this traffic inside Google Analytics GA4. So, to do this you're obviously going to need a GA4 account and you're going to need the tracking properly set up on your website. There is two ways to do this. I'm going to show you the quick way, then I'm going to show you the proper way. Let's do the quick way first. So, we're going to head over to reports, acquisition, and then traffic acquisition. And this is going to give us the traffic reports that we used to seeing. So, this will show us how much traffic we're getting from each of these different sources. So, you'll see that there is this referral item here. Now, some of this referral traffic is traffic from AI search tools. For example, if someone clicks on a link from ChatGPT, or they click on a link from Claude, or they click on a link from Perplexity, they will come through to your website. GA4 at the moment is just lumping all of that as referral traffic, i.e. traffic that comes from links to your website. So, what we want to do is split out the stuff from this that is ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity because we want to look at that as a different type of referral traffic. It's AI referral traffic. So, how do we do that? Well, there's a couple of ways. One of my favorite ways to see just all of the AI traffic in isolation is to click add a filter. We're going to head over here and uh session default channel group. We're going to exactly match referral. So, that's going to just filter all of the traffic in our chart to just look at the referral traffic. So, we're going to click apply. And when we go down to this table, we can see now we're just looking at referral traffic. If we click on this plus button, then we can search for source. We want session source. [music] And voilà. We now have all of the different referral sources to our website, and we can see which of these are AI tools. So, we can see that actually our biggest referral source for this website is ChatGPT. Second top referral source is Gemini. We've also got Perplexity, and then we've got Claude. So, that's the quick way, but what about the long-term way where you don't have to click filters and buttons each time you want to see that traffic? Well, we can create a new one of these channels, which is AI referral traffic. So, let's look at how to do that. We're going to head over to admin, and we're going to go to channel groups, which is in the data display section. We're going to create a new channel group. I'm going to click on that button there. We're going to call this AI referral traffic. Doesn't really matter what you call it or if you give it a description, that doesn't matter at all. And I'm then going to add a new channel to this group. I'm going to call it AI referral traffic. I then need to add some conditions to this channel group. So, I'm going to click on add condition group, and this is where I tell GA4 what to include in this AI referral traffic bucket. So, my conditions are going to be the source either matches or contains chat.openai.com. What we need to do here is go through and add each of the different sources that we want to categorize as AI referral traffic. Typically, most common ones you're going to see are chat.gbt, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. So, I'm happy with those for now, and I'm going to click save channel, and then I'm going to save my channel group. And by the way, if you want to help improving your brand's visibility in AI tools like Google's AI overviews, chat.gbt, and Gemini, then the team at Exposure Ninja can do an AI search audit. We'll measure your visibility across every different AI platform, and we'll show you exactly what you need to do to improve that. This will include going really deep into the content that you've been publishing, looking at how suitable for AI it is, and which topics you might want to cover in order to improve your visibility and the number of times your website is cited by AI tools. We'll also look at your visibility across the rest of the internet, and we'll identify key websites that you can get featured on, which will help your visibility in every AI search platform. This is a massive piece of work from our team that has been doing this for huge global brands for 3 years now, but it's immensely valuable, and it really gives you a playbook for this next era in digital marketing. So, we do charge for this. If you're interested, you can head over to exposureninja.com and inquire through the contact page. If you're not quite ready for that, and you just want someone to give you an overview of where your biggest opportunities are across all of digital marketing, then you can request the free digital marketing review. Again, go to and click the big button. We'll take a look at everything you're doing in a very overview way, and give you some prioritized recommendations that you can implement to improve your visibility across search, paid search, your conversion rate on your website, all in the next 6 to 12 months. That service is completely free, but not everybody is eligible, so you do need to apply for this at exposureninja.com. So, that's now created a different group of channels inside GA4. There's one tiny thing I need to do which I've forgotten to do here, and that's to click reorder, and then make sure that I have got my AI referral traffic listed above referrals. So, I'm just going to stick it up here. The reason that we want to do this is that when GA4 is figuring out which channel to categorize something in, it works down this list. So, does it meet the conditions for direct traffic? Yes, we'll put it in there. If not, does it meet the conditions for cross network, paid shopping, and so on and so on. So, what you don't want is if you've got AI referral traffic underneath referral traffic, GA4 will go, "Well, does this look like referral traffic?" Yes, and it won't go further on. So, we need to have AI referral traffic above referral traffic. Okay, so we've got that. We're all happy with that. I'm going to click apply and save group. There we go. The next thing that you're going to want to do is click on this little pencil icon and set your AI referral traffic group as your primary channel group. So, we've got that there. We're happy. We're good to go. Now, sometimes those changes take a little bit of time to propagate, and GA4 can be a little bit slow in categorizing our traffic as this new AI referral traffic. So, if we head back over to our traffic acquisition section, we will see that, ah, we don't have our AI referral traffic here yet. So, while that's loading, I'm going to show you an example of what it looks like in another account. So, once this is working, you'll see a view like this. You can see all your different traffic sources, and AI referral traffic is one of those. So, I've waited a few minutes, and lo and behold, we have our AI referral traffic here. We can now see it as an individual traffic source on our website. Happy days. And by the way, if you don't see it, sometimes you just need to head up to this section here and just search AI referral traffic, or whatever you called it. Just give that a click, and then you should see it showing up. Now, of course, getting clicks to your website is only one of the ways that you can get traffic from AI tools. Let's say, for example, that someone's using AI mode, they've asked who are the best heat pump installers in the UK, and they see this, Elite Renewables. Well, they might then go to Google and search for Elite Renewables. When we see that traffic coming through to our website, it would just look like organic traffic. It won't look like AI traffic. So, there is a bit of a black box to AI, which means you can't track every single click. Likewise, if somebody searches for best protein powder for beginners, and you're visible in this AI overview, and someone clicks on your link, you will just see that traffic as organic traffic. That won't come through as AI overviews traffic specifically. So, our advice is track both traffic and your AI visibility. You want to keep an eye on both of them. The AI traffic is going to show you those referrals. The AI visibility is going to show you how prominent you are, and you can use one of the tools that we love working with, like Semrush, Peak, or Profound to do this. So, now you're tracking your AI traffic, you're probably going to want to increase it. Check out this video about how to get AI tools to recommend your brand more often. Until next time, see you soon.