How Do You Track Traffic from AI Platforms?
Learn how to track website traffic from AI sources like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini using Google Analytics.
Video Transcript
David: I wanted to show you something. In the past, we’ve talked about using Google Analytics to keep track of how AI agents are accessing your data. Right? We set up a really quick Google report to monitor that. I found a better way of doing it. I wanted to walk you through it as an example with the hopes that you might be able to do it yourself. But also, I’d love for us to compare data on this. So, the best way I found to do this is simply from your Google Analytics, go to reports, and go to acquisition and traffic acquisition. The first thing I want to do is change my default channel group, which is a great way to look at your traffic, to just source. So, now we have the websites that are sending traffic to the site. Right? I also want to add a secondary dimension, a landing page. Okay. Now, I know this source of traffic came to the site this many times, and this source of traffic came to this page this many times, blah, blah, blah. Right? So, this is basically which website sent traffic to the site over this period of time and what page they landed on. Okay. So that’s, that’s straightforward. But we can do something a little better. We can go to filter, and this will help us limit traffic. So, what I want to do is go to session source as the filter, but I want to match by a regex. Regex is a way computer programs will often use to match text. So, it can be complicated. But the regex I’m going to use is a little bit more complex. So, maybe you can read it here on the screen. I’m looking for anything that matches any source that matches chatgpt.com, perplexity.AI, copilot.microsoft.com, and gemini.google.com. So, I’m adding more than just ChatGPT. Previously, we were just looking at ChatGPT traffic. I apply this and I’ve got no traffic. Let’s grow our time period. There we go. So, this website, in the last 90 days, is getting traffic from ChatGPT, and it’s come to these two pages. What’s really nice is I’ve noticed traffic starting to come from Perplexity as a platform and Copilot and Gemini, which is Google’s AI platform. This will catch all those sources, and then, if I want to, I can set up a report to share this report. I can send an email. I want to name this Traffic Acquisition from AI. I’d also add which website, because of this email, you could potentially set up for each of your clients. So, the email, if it’s the same subject, will be really confusing as to which website the report is for. You can enter the email addresses of people who have access to this Google Analytics profile. That’s the only people you can send this report to. So I could send it to myself as a PDF. Oh, actually, I did this wrong. Let’s discard this. I want to schedule an email because I really want a weekly email. So, I’m going to do the same thing. Traffic Acquisition from AI. What I’ve done here just to keep track is paste the regex here in the description because, in the future, it might change, and I might want to do a different report as I start to see more platforms. So this will help me know which report to cancel.
Tricia: That was going to be my question. So, we just see, I guess, the AI that’s out there?
David: Well, there are several AIs out there. These are the ones I’ve seen most likely to send traffic.
Tricia: Yeah. Okay.
David: I’m going to keep up with this to see if things start growing. But these are the ones that are really working.
Tricia: I do have a question about the description where you have the regex.
David: Yeah.
David: You have ChatGPT, the slash.com, and then the pipe. Why is that?
David: Okay, this is the format of regex. Regular expressions. Different characters mean different things. So, in a regular expression, a period actually means any character, any one character. So, I have to precede this period with a backslash to tell regex that I don’t want a wild card here. The slash before the period says to make it match a real period. The pipe, in regular expressions, is an “or.”
Tricia: Okay.
David: So, this will match anything with a session, because that’s what we’ve set as the regex here, which starts with chatgpt.com or perplexity.AI or copilot.Microsoft.com or Gemini Google.
Tricia: Okay.
David: That’s what that regex means. Okay, let me just put this in the chat so you all have it. Then what I can do is set it up because I like this to come to me on Sunday mornings every week. This is something new since the last time we did it. You have to say how long you want this report to go on. So, 12 months is the most, so I might set a calendar invite or just when I notice that this stops delivering weekly. I like the PDF report and then in what language I want it. Then I hit save after I decide which email addresses get this, and now, I will get a weekly report, in this case, every Sunday for the next 12 months, telling me if anyone has visited my website from any of the AI sites. What’s new about this that we’ve not talked about before is number one, I’ve actually seen Perplexity bring more traffic to some of my clients than I realized. And I’m not familiar with Perplexity as a platform. I use ChatGPT, and I’m a customer of it, so that’s kind of where my mind goes. Copilot uses ChatGPT, but it reports differently. Gemini is Google’s independent AI platform. However, this won’t show traffic from AI-generated results in search results. From what I understand, that’s still going to come from Google or Bing. So, this is really people using chatbots of these four types and how they might bring traffic in. I think this is really valuable for keeping up with stuff. I’m still seeing blog posts that do a good job bringing traffic from AI, which totally makes sense. Two, I see consistently on some of my high traffic websites, them getting customers from those. As the questions are answered, they look at the source for the answer. They find that my client is one of the answers that ChatGPT or Perplexity is recommending, and they come to the site and make contact with the client. That’s the gold, right? But also, as traffic starts to grow, I might add this as a separate page in my monthly report because more and more clients are going to be asking about SEO and stuff, but also, what about ChatGPT, or how do I rank in ChatGPT, or how do you AIEO or LLMEO, or whatever the nomenclature is right now? This is going to give me more information. Also, I will be ready to help if a client does ask me this. I will have some data and some awareness. I’m just sending it to myself once a week to keep up with what’s going on. Some of my clients haven’t gotten much. Other clients have actually gotten a fair amount, nowhere near the amount that Google brings. But, like I said, my clients have gotten a couple of customers from this. So, it might be worth setting up, and then we can compare notes to see how this looks. Make sense? Any questions?
Onawa: Can you tell me again where you put all of the ChatGPT, Perplexity, because I have kept up with just the ChatGPT?
David: Yeah, it’s actually over here in the upper left. Let me just clear this out. If you followed me, you did session landing page here. Under the title of this page, you can add a filter. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re saying we’re applying a filter that should only show us in this chart and table traffic from a particular filter. So, the filter we want to mention is session, source, match type is matches regex, regular expression. Value is the regular expression. Hit apply. Now, if you hover over your filter, you see that this only shows us traffic from these.
Onawa: Okay.
David: And if you set up a recurring email or heck, you can download the file if you wanted to show your clients a PDF of this report easily. Or there are all kinds of things you could do if you had that wanted to produce it. But here’s the PDF report. Not particularly exciting in this case. But anyway, it’s a great way to keep up with what’s going on.
