How to Track AI Traffic in GA4 in 2025: A Practical Guide

If you want to learn how to track AI traffic in GA4, the short story is that GA4 does not do it for you by default, but you can configure it. As AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT now drive a meaningful share of discovery, untagged visits quietly land in Direct or generic Referral, masking real GEO performance.

The shift in user behavior is undeniable. 63% of websites already receive traffic from AI tools, with ChatGPT alone driving 50% of that, making it the single largest AI referrer. Yet without proper tracking, this valuable traffic remains hidden in your analytics, making it impossible to measure ROI or optimize your content strategy.

This guide provides a complete framework for configuring GA4 to accurately identify, measure, and report on this growing traffic source.

Quick Summary – How to Track AI Traffic in GA4

• GA4 doesn’t automatically track AI-driven traffic, but custom channel groups and regex rules can help you surface it accurately.
• Many AI visits from AI search platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity AI appear under Direct or Referral, making configuration essential for correct attribution.
• Use GA4’s Exploration reports and Looker Studio dashboards to visualize AI traffic trends, engagement, and conversions over time.
• Add UTMs, session segments, and custom dimensions to separate AI platforms from traditional sources and improve reporting precision.
• Combine GA4 tracking with Addlly AI’s GEO and SEO insights to understand how AI platforms influence discovery and user behavior.

Step-by-Step Guide on How You Can Track AI Traffic in GA4

Tracking AI traffic in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has become essential as more users discover websites through AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. Standard reports don’t yet isolate AI-driven traffic, which means brands often underestimate how much traffic is actually coming from AI platforms. With the right setup, you can segment traffic from AI tools, build a custom channel group, and use advanced reports to see which AI responses are sending visitors to your site.

Step 1: Identify Common AI Sources

Before creating new channel groups, identify the AI sources driving visitors to your site. These typically appear as referral traffic in your Traffic Acquisition Report but are often buried under “Direct” or “Referral.” Look for domains such as:

• chat.openai.com (ChatGPT)
• perplexity.ai
• bing.com/chat (Bing Copilot)
• gemini.google.com (Google Gemini)
• you.com (YouChat)

Knowing your AI traffic sources will help when you set channel conditions and match them with regex expressions in GA4.

Read our guide on: Best AI Tools for Improving Brand Visibility

Step 2: Create a Custom Channel Group for AI Traffic

To track AI traffic accurately, create a new channel group in Google Analytics 4:

1. Go to Admin → Data Settings → Channel Groups.
2. Click Create new channel group.
3. Under Group Name, enter something like “AI Traffic.”
4. Add a New Channel, set Channel Name to “AI Channel.”
5. In Channel Conditions, choose Session source or Page referrer and enter expressions such as:
   matches regex (chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|bing\.com/chat|gemini\.google\.com)
6. Click Save, then Reorder to ensure your AI Channel appears above “Referral” and “Direct.”

This isolates traffic coming from AI platforms into a dedicated AI channel for reporting.

Step 3: Analyze AI Traffic in the Traffic Acquisition Report

Once your new channel is active, open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition. Use the Primary Dimension dropdown and select Session source / medium. You’ll now see AI-driven traffic separated from other channels like Organic Search, Social, and Direct.

Here you can analyze metrics such as:

• Engaged sessions and Engagement rate from AI users
• Landing pages generating the most AI traffic
• Conversions and Key events triggered by AI visitors

This gives you a clear picture of how much traffic is being referred by AI tools and whether those sessions convert.

Step 4: Build a Custom Exploration Report in GA4

Once your AI channel group is live, the next step is to create a custom Exploration Report to visualize and analyze patterns in AI-driven traffic. While the Traffic Acquisition Report gives a snapshot, Explorations let you dig deeper into session behavior, conversion paths, and landing page performance for each AI source.

Here’s how to create it:

1. Go to Explore in your GA4 property.
2. Click Blank Exploration → name it AI Traffic Analysis.
3. Under Variables, add Session source, Session medium, and your AI Channel.
4. Add metrics such as Users, Sessions, Engagement rate, Conversions, and Key events.
5. Drag your dimensions into the Rows section and metrics into the Values section.
6. Filter by your new AI channel or by regex patterns like (chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai).

You can use the Data Table for detailed insights or a Line Chart to visualize how AI-driven traffic grows over time. This view reveals whether your AI discovery performance is improving with your content strategy updates.

Step 5: Create Session Segments for AI Users

Segments help you compare AI-driven sessions with other traffic sources like Organic Search or Social.
Use this feature to understand how AI visitors interact differently, whether they stay longer, engage more deeply, or convert faster.

To set it up:

1. In Explore, click Segments → Create new session segment.
2. Choose the Session source as the condition.
3. Enter regex: matches regex (chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|bing\.com/chat)
4. Name the segment AI Sessions and click Save.

Once applied to your exploration report, you can directly compare engagement, conversions, and landing pages between AI and non-AI cohorts.

Step 6: Visualize AI Traffic in Looker Studio

For a more visual, shareable dashboard, connect GA4 to Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio). This helps you display AI performance alongside other channels in a unified view.

Recommended setup:

• Use Session source / medium or Channel name as your primary dimension.
• Add scorecards for Users, Sessions, Conversions, and Engagement rate.
• Build time-series charts showing AI traffic growth against Organic Search or Referral.
• Include a data display section highlighting your top landing pages and content categories attracting AI-driven traffic.

This visualization helps stakeholders see how much traffic and conversions originate from AI platforms, turning raw data into actionable insight.

Step 7: Enhance Attribution with UTM Parameters and Custom Dimensions

For advanced users, adding UTM parameters or custom dimensions ensures even cleaner attribution when AI responses include your URLs.
If your content is frequently cited in Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT answers, or Perplexity results, you can tag links using unique parameters like:

utm_source=chatgpt&utm_medium=ai&utm_campaign=organic_ai

This allows you to track performance across channel groups, custom reports, and session segments without depending solely on referrers.

Additionally, you can create a Custom Dimension called AI Source to classify each visit by its originating AI platform, improving the depth of your conversion analysis.

Step 8: Monitor, Optimize, and Report

Once your AI tracking system is live, make it part of your ongoing marketing analytics routine.

• Review the Traffic Acquisition Report weekly to monitor AI traffic growth.
• Compare AI sessions to search engines and referral traffic for benchmarking.
• Identify landing pages that consistently appear in AI overviews or chat answers.
• Use findings to refine your content strategy, targeting AI discoverability rather than just Google Search results.

Finally, feed these insights into your Looker Studio report for a comprehensive view of how AI discovery contributes to your overall website success.

How Addlly AI Can Be a Game Changer in Tracking AI Traffic

Even with a fully configured GA4 setup, tracking AI-driven website traffic still requires significant manual effort. GA4 can tell you where the traffic came from, but not why it appeared, how it evolved across AI platforms, or what that means for your broader visibility. That’s where Addlly AI bridges the gap.

Built for the post-search era, Addlly AI provides marketers with a comprehensive view of how AI ecosystems impact web performance. It connects AI discovery, content visibility, and traffic attribution into one streamlined system, something traditional analytics tools can’t yet do natively.

Here’s how Addlly AI transforms the way you measure and optimize:

• GEO Audit: Identifies how and where your content appears across global AI platforms and GEO-specific search environments. It reveals which AI tools – like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews are driving discovery.
• SEO AI Agent: Monitors your content’s visibility within AI-generated responses, tracking which keywords or entities trigger AI citations.
• AI GEO Agent: Detects AI-sourced visits that GA4 might misclassify, giving you a unified picture of AI traffic and its conversion impact.
• Media Strategy AI Agent: Helps you translate these insights into strategic channel planning, ensuring that your content strategy aligns with where AI-driven users actually come from.

By layering Addlly AI insights on top of your Google Analytics 4 reports, you gain precision that traditional tracking can’t match, turning hidden AI referrals into measurable, actionable data.

In short, Addlly AI doesn’t just measure traffic; it interprets intent, visibility, and opportunity across the evolving AI web.

The Road Ahead for AI Traffic Analytics

The future of analytics isn’t about counting clicks; it’s about understanding intent. As AI platforms increasingly guide discovery, marketers can no longer rely solely on search engine metrics to gauge visibility or success. The audience journey now begins inside AI responses, and only those equipped to measure it will see the full picture of their performance.

By configuring GA4 to recognize AI-driven traffic and layering it with Addlly AI’s deeper intelligence, brands can connect content exposure to outcomes in a way that traditional analytics simply can’t. This shift marks the beginning of a new measurement era, one where AI visibility becomes as important as SEO.

For marketers, the opportunity is clear: track smarter, interpret faster, and adapt content for how people actually discover today. Because in the age of AI, it’s not just about being found, it’s about being recognized.

FAQs – Tracking Traffic from AI Platforms