Google Analytics 4
Google's event-based analytics platform, which replaced Universal Analytics in July 2023 and models sessions and users from event streams.
GEO AILLM referrals
AI referral traffic
Visits arriving from AI assistants and answer engines, identifiable in analytics by referrer hosts such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com.
In full
Volumes are typically small relative to search but often convert well, because a user arriving from a recommendation has already been pre-qualified. Attribution is imperfect: some assistants strip or vary referrers, in-app browsers can be misclassified as direct, and clicks from Google's AI features are reported inside ordinary Google Search data rather than separately. Building an explicit referrer-based channel group is the standard first step.
Example
A GA4 channel group for AI assistants shows 1.2% of sessions but a conversion rate roughly double that of organic search.
Related terms
Attribution
Assigning credit for a conversion across the touchpoints that preceded it, using rules such as last click, first click, or data-driven…
Answer engine
A system that responds to a question with a synthesised answer and citations rather than a ranked list of documents — for example…
Generative AI performance report
Search Console views introduced in 2026 showing impressions and clicks for a site's links inside Google's generative AI features on Search…
Synthetic traffic
Automated, non-human requests to a site — crawlers, scrapers, monitoring, agents — which increasingly outnumber human visits and distort…