AI Referrals
Measure traffic from AI assistants and answer engines
Visitors who arrive from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or AI Overviews land in a dedicated AI-referrals view. Detection happens server-side from the Referer header — no cookies, no fingerprints, no guessing.
Sources
Closed allow-list of AI surfaces
Detection is matched against a maintained list of AI hostnames. The list grows as new surfaces emerge; we never fabricate an attribution.
| AI source | Hostname | Note |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | chat.openai.com / chatgpt.com | OpenAI's consumer surface. |
| Claude | claude.ai | Anthropic's consumer surface. |
| Perplexity | perplexity.ai | Answer engine; both consumer + Pro tiers. |
| Gemini | gemini.google.com | Google's AI assistant. |
| AI Overviews | google.com (AI Overview path) | Google Search AI Overview links. |
Operational use cases
What the AI referrals view tells you
- Which AI surface sent the most referral traffic this month.
- Which pages on your site are being cited in AI answers (by tracking where the referrals land).
- Whether crawling activity (see Bot Intelligence) is converting into actual referral traffic.
- How AI traffic mixes with organic search and direct visits over time.
FAQ
Frequently asked
- How is an AI referral detected?
- Server-side from the Referer header at ingest time. The hostname is matched against a closed allow-list of AI surfaces. Each match emits an event tagged with the AI source name.
- What happens when an AI surface strips the referrer?
- It cannot be attributed to that AI source. The visit lands in direct or organic traffic, not in AI referrals. We never guess — if the Referer is missing or generic, the event is honest about it.
- Does this require a cookie or fingerprint?
- No. The detection runs from a single request header. The tracker is cookieless and stores no fingerprint.
- Does 'no AI referrals' mean the site is invisible to AI?
- No. It means no referral event has been attributed in the selected window. The site may still be crawled by AI bots (see Bot Intelligence) and may appear in AI answers without sending a referrer. The two surfaces are distinct.