AI referral traffic
AI referral traffic is the visits that arrive on your website from links in AI assistants and AI search tools.
Example
A reader clicks a cited link in a ChatGPT answer and lands on your pricing page. If the visit carries a referrer that Google Analytics recognizes, GA4 can group the session under its AI Assistant channel.
How it is measured
Google Analytics 4 has an AI Assistant default channel for visits from sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok. GA4 sets the medium to ai-assistant when the referrer matches its list of AI assistants. The same documentation excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode from the channel.
Referral counts can understate AI traffic. Some visits from AI tools arrive without a referrer and are reported as direct, and tools not on a list are not grouped with the rest. It is safer to treat a referral count as a floor than as a total.
How Stellarcast handles it
When you connect Google Analytics 4, Stellarcast reads sessions in GA4's AI Assistant channel each day, per market, and treats the count as a floor, since AI visits that arrive without a referrer land in Direct instead.
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