Use Google Analytics to Monitor AI Driven Search Traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity

AI Driven Search Traffic in Google Analytics

*Updated March 27, 2024*

In August 2023, the Seer team created a dashboard to monitor the growing trend of AI driven search traffic. About 6 months later, we embarked on an update to this dashboard to provide greater value to both our clients and the search community. This post is updated with new information, and some of the original content remains.

For AI driven search tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini,  we can now see traffic showing up in our Google Analytics - or analytics tool of choice - alongside our other traffic channel groupings:

As of March 29, 2024, OpenAI announced that they will be making links more prominent when ChatGPT browses the internet. These platforms were likely already sending some traffic to your websites, and we expect that traffic to increase as links and citations are more broadly visible.

How a user gets from an AI platform to your website

Use cases for AI chatbots and LLMs are growing daily. It’s not uncommon for us to hear from brands that platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are driving MQLs. At a minimum, brands must monitor what type of engagement is happening on these platforms by their customers.

Links and citations are being more commonly added to results within AI search platforms. This provides a much needed data point that can be aggregated and analyzed, though the full picture of the impact of these platforms on your audience remains cloudy at best.

Our Analytics team at Seer Interactive built a way to see some of that data in Google Analytics back in 2023, and as of April 2024 we have a new version available for download. 

How to track AI-driven search traffic

Copy Seer's 'AI Signal' Looker Dashboards (2-Minutes)

As AI continues to influence search marketing, it's important to understand how your digital presence is affected. In-platform ‘keyword’ tracking is still in a nascent stage, so marketers’ best current indicator is through their website analytics provider.

[Pro Tip] Traffic to your site from AI tools is not the only data input you need to understand AI's impact on how users find your business.

This is where our free Looker Dashboard(s) come into play.

The views will allow you to track AI-search traffic landing on your website directly in Google Analytics.

Create a copy of Looker Dashboard for Google Analytics 4 Accounts:

Create a copy of Looker Dashboard for Google Analytics 'Universal Analytics' Accounts:

How does Seer's AI Driven Search Traffic dashboard work?

Seer’s dashboard relies on referral traffic, which is traffic from another website or platform. This data doesn’t tell the full story of your customer’s online journey and it’s overly reliant on direct actions. That said, it’s among the best methodologies we have to understand the importance of different channels on our audience.

What can I do with this data?

We have 3 considerations for you before using this data to make decisions.

1. Use this data directionally, with less emphasis on raw numbers and more emphasis on growth patterns

Not all AI-search tools pass referrer information to your analytics tools, so this is not a holistic look of all AI Driven search traffic. Additionally, many AI search platforms may mention your brand or influence your audience in a way that isn’t recorded in this dataset.

We recommend that you look at this as a percentage of total traffic and set some baselines.

[Pro Tip] Set-up a AI-Powered Search channel in your analytics account. Jump to setion on how to create a Channel.

2. Set ‘when to care’ thresholds based on this data 

Once you have established some benchmarks, we recommend you discuss ‘when to care’ thresholds with your leadership team. As that percentage rises, you’ll want to know when to start to investigate it more heavily and create a strategy around how to handle and harness this traffic.

3. Get your old-school SEO hat on and try to reverse engineer ‘the why’

At this point we don’t have great visibility into what brands these platforms are referencing to the same degree we have for Google search. In the absence of that data, we are left with a need to fill in the gaps ourselves.

John-Henry Scherck of Growth Plays shared this tweet, which is a great example of how to reverse engineer landing page analysis for AI search traffic.

Set up AI-search traffic channel in your analytics account (<10 minutes)

If our free dashboard isn’t a fit for your analytics instance, we still have you covered. Take a look at these simple steps to set up your own measurement system for AI driven traffic with Google Analytics 4, PiwikPRO, or Adobe. 

Note: As of 4/2/2024 these dashboards are not yet updated. Please check back in the next few days for updates.

Google Analytics 4

1. Open Google Analytics 4
2. Navigate: Admin > Data Settings > Channel Groups
   
3. Enter 'Group Name' - we used "Channels 2023"
4. Enter 'Channel Name' - we used "AI-Driven Search"
5. For conditions use "matches regex" and copy / paste this regex formula:
   
   (.*gpt.*|(.*google.*bard.*|.*bard.*google.*)|.*neeva.*|.*writesonic.*)

6. Save channel

PiwikPRO:

1. Open PiwickPRO
2. Navigate: Settings > Custom channel grouping > Add a custom channel grouping

Adobe Analytics

1. Open Adobe Analytics
2. Navigate: Admin > Report Suite Manager > Marketing Channels > Marketing Channel Manager

Where do we go from here?

AI driven search traffic is a fascinating new frontier. Marketers should be both eager to learn more and cautious of the impact these new platforms will have on performance. By following the steps we’ve recommended above, we believe you’ll be steps ahead of your competitors on the journey of maintaining (or growing) relevance.