All You Need is GA4 and 5 Minutes
According to this SEMRush research, AI search visitors will surpass traditional search visitors by 2028. And we thought the desktop to mobile transition was fast!
Are AI search platforms sending traffic to your website? With changes to ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, links within AI summaries are becoming the norm.
But is your website content making the cut? How can you know?
Start By Checking If Any AI Traffic is Coming To Your Website
First, make sure you have Google Analytics (GA4) installed on your website. You’ll want to make sure you’re collecting as much historic data as possible. If you’re not sure or if you don’t have GA4 running, talk to me.
The good news is that AI-driven traffic shows up in some standard reports, if you know where to look.
Navigate to Reports > Life Cycle > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition
We understand that some GA4 interfaces are slightly different than others. Your Traffic Acquisition report is a common one for regular GA4 users.
Modify your report’s date range to the last 90 days or year to date to get a good segment of data.
Select your data channel as Session source.
How to read your Session Source report
Session Source refers to the specific origin of a user’s traffic during a session. It indicates where the user came from before arriving on your website or app. Examples include “google” for users arriving from Google Search, “youtube” for users coming from YouTube, or “gmail” for users arriving from Gmail.
Session source also tags the various AI platforms.
Sorting AI Traffic in Session Source
If your website sees a healthy amount of traffic from multiple marketing channels, Session Source results may be in the hundreds. You can choose to doom-scroll through the results, but doing a search is a world easier.
Below your traffic line graph, there is a search bar. Start with some of the most popular AI search platforms:
- ChatGPT
- Gemini (Google)
- Copilot (Microsoft)
- Perplexity
- Claude
It may be a bit tedious to search and review these results one by one, but it does give you a quick sense of how much traffic is coming in.
Which AI Traffic Metrics Should You Monitor?
AI sourced traffic is very high-intent. Site visitors are very motivated to learn more about your service, product, or destination. Keep an eye on:
- Engaged sessions (and engagement rate %)
- Average session duration
If you have more sophisticated user experience flow tracking in GA4, you should be able to sort how AI traffic behaves compared to other traffic sources.
How Can I Monitor AI Traffic Over Time?
In our next article, we will walk you through creating a custom Segment for AI traffic and leveraging Audiences to view results and additional behavior over time.