Generative AI is already affecting website traffic for every business.
While you cannot yet track how many times your site’s content appears as part of a generative AI result, you can track how much traffic the two biggest AI tools, ChatGPT and Google Gemini, send to your website.
How to track traffic from ChatGPT
When ChatGPT outputs a generative result, it will often include source links where it got its information. When clicked, ChatGPT adds the parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com to the end of the URL.
In the example below, the first source link goes to https://biztimes.com/timeline/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
UTM parameters are special code at the end of a URL that helps Google Analytics track how people got to your site. Specifically, utm_source identifies the name of the site, app, publication, ad network, etc. that sent the traffic.
To see this traffic in Google Analytics:
- Go to Reports > Lifecycle > Traffic Acquisition.
- There is a dropdown at the top of the results that defaults to “Session primary channel group”. Click the dropdown and change it to “Session source”.
- Type “chatgpt” into the search box right above the results.
This filters all sources of new sessions to your website only to referrals from ChatGPT. Of course, you can set the date range of this report and can even save this as a segment in Google Analytics if desired.
If you want to see exactly which pages ChatGPT linked to:
- Stay on the same report as above.
- Click the blue plus symbol next to the “Session source” dropdown at the top of the results.
- Search for “landing page” and select “Landing page + query string”.
This shows a list of every page that ChatGPT linked to and how many sessions resulted from ChatGPT to each page.
How to track traffic from Google Gemini
Google Gemini generative results can be seen it two places. First, if you do a Google Search, you will often see an “AI Overview” section that is powered by Gemini. Within these results, Google will give links to the sources for it’s answer as shown below.
You can also ask a question directly on Google Gemini. Gemini will sometimes show links to its sources in these results as shown below.
To see this traffic in Google Analytics:
- Go to Reports > Lifecycle > Traffic Acquisition.
- There is a dropdown at the top of the results that defaults to “Session primary channel group”. Click the dropdown and change it to “Session source”.
- Type “gemini” into the search box right above the results.
This filters all sources of new sessions to your website only to referrals from Google Gemini. Of course, you can set the date range of this report and can even save this as a segment in Google Analytics if desired.
If you want to see exactly which pages Gemini linked to:
- Stay on the same report as above.
- Click the blue plus symbol next to the “Session source” dropdown at the top of the results.
- Search for “landing page” and select “Landing page + query string”.
The future of generative search traffic
Generative AI is here to stay, and it is indeed impacting traffic to nearly all websites. Source attribution and links by ChatGPT and Google Gemini are a good start, however there are still big issues:
- Not all generative AI tools provide attribution and links.
- Not all results from either ChatGPT or Google Gemini display source attribution and links.
- Search traffic to publisher websites will still be replaced to a degree by generative AI results.
But at least now you can see how much traffic ChatGPT and Google Gemini are actually driving to your website.
