AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity aren’t just growing—they’re changing how people discover content. Search engines have long been the gateway to websites, but AI-driven recommendations are now reshaping traffic patterns faster than expected. Just a few weeks ago, I predicted this shift, but little did I know the future would arrive this quickly. AI-driven referrals are already happening, and websites are seeing more traffic coming from answer engines than ever before.
The question is: Are you tracking and analyzing this new source of traffic effectively?
In this article, we lay out 3 steps you can take in your GA4 account to start analyzing AI-referred traffic. Here is what we are covering:
- Who and when should you analyze AI referred traffic?
- How to check if you’re getting AI Traffic in GA4
- How should you analyze AI referred traffic?
- Challenges
Who and when should you analyze AI referred traffic?
Tracking AI-referred traffic makes the most sense if your audience is already engaging with AI-powered tools. If your users are tech-savvy, professionals, or early adopters, AI-driven referrals could already be shaping their online journeys.
On the other hand, if your audience is less AI-inclined or you don’t see AI traffic in GA4 yet, it’s not an immediate priority—but you should still keep an eye on the trend.
Check if you’re getting AI Traffic in GA4
In your GA4 account, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, and change the Primary Dimension to Session Source.
Do you see traffic from sources like chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai?
✅ If yes, it’s time to start tracking AI traffic separately.
❌ If not, you may not need to take action yet—but it’s worth checking periodically.
An incomplete list of several popular answer engines are given below – it includes the current most popular ones.
How should you analyze AI referred traffic?
Like with any other channel, there are several ways you could isolate AI traffic for analysis. Here are some of the ways:
- Add filters to your exploration reports
- Create a Custom channel grouping (mostly for attribution reports, works on historical data too)
- Create Segments
- Bonus: Create audiences
Before we dive into these specific implementations, let’s talk a little bit about which AI tools are major and most likely sending traffic to websites (popular opinion). As mentioned earlier, this isn’t an exhaustive list but at the time of writing these are some of the most popular tools. Moreover, the top 4 are more popular than the rest. Here is the list:
List of Popular AI tools/Answer Engines (including Multimodal Engines). (Feb 2025)
- chatgpt.com
- perplexity.ai
- gemini.google.com
- copilot.microsoft.com
- meta.ai
- you.com
- blackbox.ai
- chat.mistral.ai
- felo.ai
- arc.net
- andisearch.com
- komo.ai
- waldo.fyi
- duckduckgo AI Chat
A single Regex (Regular Expression) to capture all AI-referred traffic in GA4
To group all AI-referred traffic in GA4, we’ll use Regular Expressions (Regex) to match known AI referrers.
Here’s the Regex pattern we’ll use:
chatgpt\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|meta\.ai|you\.com|blackbox\.ai|chat\.mistral\.ai|felo\.ai|arc\.net|andisearch\.com|komo\.ai|waldo\.fyi
This pattern captures multiple AI platforms in a single rule, allowing GA4 to filter them under one category.
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