LLM referral tracking means identifying traffic that comes from AI tools such as chat assistants and answer engines. Some arrive with a referrer you can group, others show up as direct traffic, so the numbers are a floor and not a full count.
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Setting it up
In your analytics, create a channel group or segment that matches the referrer domains of the AI tools you see in your data. Review it from time to time, because domains change and new tools appear.
Reading the numbers
Pair the tracked visits with a self-reported question on your signup form, such as how did you hear about us. Together they give a fuller picture than either alone.
Common mistakes
Treating the tracked number as the total
Many AI-influenced visits arrive without a referrer and land in direct.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not to links an AI tool chooses to show. You can tag links you place yourself, such as in your own profiles.
Keep reading
- AI Referral Traffic: AI referral traffic is visits that arrive from AI assistants and answer engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, when users click a cited link.
- Dark traffic: Dark traffic is visits from sources analytics cannot see, such as private messages, apps and documents, which usually show up as Direct.
- Direct traffic: Direct traffic is visits analytics cannot attribute to any source. It includes typed URLs and bookmarks, plus many visits whose referrer was lost.
- Channel grouping: Channel grouping sorts traffic sources into buckets like Organic Search, Paid Search, Email and Referral using rules based on source, medium and campaign.
- Agentic Browsing: Agentic browsing is when an AI model operates a web browser for a user, reading pages, clicking, scrolling and filling in forms to complete a task.
- AI Agents: AI agents are systems where a language model plans and takes actions with tools, such as searching, browsing, filling forms or calling APIs, to finish a task.
- AI Answer Sentiment: AI answer sentiment is how positively, neutrally or negatively AI assistants describe your brand, and which strengths and weaknesses they repeat.
- AI Answer Variability: AI answer variability is the way the same prompt can produce different answers, sources and brand mentions across runs, users, places and time.
