Measure traffic from AI assistants

When an AI assistant links to your page and someone clicks, that visit shows up in Google Analytics 4 under the assistant's domain, mixed in with every other referral. RankKit SEO pulls those sessions out and groups them by assistant, so you can see at a glance how much traffic AI search sends you and whether it's growing.

This report is free. It uses your own GA4 data, so it needs a GA4 property that already collects your site's traffic.

Set it up

1. Make sure GA4 tracks your site. If nothing adds the tag yet, add the GA4 tag with RankKit SEO.
2. Connect Google in RankKit SEO → Analytics and choose your property in Google Analytics 4.
3. Open the Traffic & AI referrals tab.

Read the report

The Visits from AI assistants card shows:

• the total sessions from AI assistants in the selected period, and the total in the previous period
• a bar per assistant, largest first. Hover a bar to see its sessions and key events.

The period follows the date range at the top of RankKit SEO → Analytics (7 days to 12 months). Next to it on the same tab are your overall GA4 numbers: Sessions, Organic search sessions, Engagement rate and Key events. See Search and traffic reports.

If no assistant has sent visits yet, the card says No AI assistant visits yet.

Which assistants are recognized

RankKit SEO looks for these strings in GA4's session source (not case-sensitive):

Assistant	Session source contains
ChatGPT	chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com
Perplexity	perplexity
Claude	claude.ai
Gemini	gemini.google, bard.google
Copilot	copilot.microsoft, edgeservices.bing
You.com	you.com
Phind	phind.com
DeepSeek	deepseek
Meta AI	meta.ai
Grok	grok.com
Le Chat	mistral.ai

GA4 sets the session source from the referrer, or from a utm_source tag such as utm_source=chatgpt.com when the link has one, so both kinds of visit are counted.

Where else you see it

• The WordPress dashboard widget shows Visits from AI assistants for the last 28 days when the Dashboard widget module is on.
• The email report includes AI-assistant visits and the top assistants.
• AI agents can read the numbers with the analytics_ai_referrals MCP tool while Google is connected.

RankKit SEO Pro RankKit SEO Pro turns visits into money: AI referral revenue credits WooCommerce orders to the assistant that sent the shopper, and AI visibility tracking shows whether assistants mention and cite you in the first place. Start a 14-day free trial or see plans.

AI referrals versus AI crawlers

These are two different things, and RankKit SEO shows both:

	AI referrals	AI crawlers
What it is	A person clicking a link in an AI answer	A bot reading your pages for training, search or a live answer
Where	Analytics → Traffic & AI referrals	AI Visibility → AI crawlers
Data source	GA4	Your own server, logged by RankKit SEO

Crawler visits show that AI systems read your content; referrals show that people act on it. See Control and track AI crawlers.

FAQ

Why do I see AI crawler visits but no AI referrals?

Being read is not the same as being linked to. Assistants often answer without linking, and people don't always click. Work through the AI search checklist to make your pages easier to cite.

Why are my numbers lower than I expected?

Some AI apps open links without a referrer and without a utm_source, so GA4 records them as direct traffic and nobody can attribute them. Consent banners that block GA4 also reduce what GA4 sees. Treat the report as a minimum.

Is this the same as GA4's own reports?

It's the same GA4 data, filtered to AI assistants and grouped by name. You'd get similar numbers in GA4 with a filter on session source.