AI traffic analytics

AI referral traffic, counted visitor by visitor

Being cited is only half the story. WriteWorks counts the real people who click through from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI answers to your site, breaks them down by the assistant that sent them, and keeps AI crawlers out of the visitor numbers.

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Connects to the tools your team already uses

The challenge

Why AI traffic is hard to see

The channel exists in your analytics, just not under its own name.

LLM traffic disappears into direct and referral

Visitors arriving from an AI answer often land in analytics with a vague source, so the channel growing fastest gets lumped in with everything else and nobody can say how big it is.

Bots and people get counted together

AI assistants send crawlers as well as visitors. Without separating the two, a spike in GPTBot or PerplexityBot activity looks like an audience you do not actually have.

Citations never get tied to clicks

Visibility reports say you were mentioned. They rarely say whether that mention sent anyone to the site, which is the question leadership actually asks.

Coverage is uneven across engines

Winning the answer on one assistant says nothing about the other nine your buyers actually ask.

The solution

How AI traffic analytics works

Classify every request, separate people from bots, attribute the people.

The human visits view shows AI-referred visits, the share of your traffic that came from AI, and a platform table with sessions and share for each assistant that sent people, so you can see which engines actually deliver visitors.

◆How AI traffic analytics worksLIVE
Customer story

How teams are winning AI search

From invisibility to category dominance across every major answer engine.

Closed the gap

“WriteWorks showed us exactly which competitors AI was recommending instead of us, and the sentiment behind every mention. We closed the gap across every major engine.”

RN
Rohan Navarro Director of Growth, Keepa
Capabilities

AI referral traffic capabilities

Everything needed to count and report the visitors AI sends.

AI-referred visits

Real people arriving from an AI assistant, tracked over time.

Share of traffic from AI

AI referrals as a percentage of all human visits.

Referrals by source

Sessions and share for each assistant that sends you people.

Crawl-to-visit funnel

Bot visits, pages crawled, citation fetches and humans referred, in one view.

Report widgets

"Referred humans" and "Human referrals by source" drop straight into report decks.

GA4 segments for AI sources

Build a GA4 segment on AI source and medium values to run reports on that slice.

Time savings

What changes when AI traffic is counted

From a vague referral bucket to a channel with its own number.

TaskBeforeWith WriteWorksTime saved
Answer how much traffic AI sendsGuess from a vague referral bucketAI-referred visits and share of trafficThe guesswork
Compare assistantsManual referrer filters in GA4Sessions and share per platformHours per month
Report AI traffic to leadershipScreenshots and caveatsReferral widgets in the report deckThe monthly scramble
Included

What's included

Every AI referral traffic capability.

AI-referred visits and share of traffic from AI
Human referrals broken down by assistant
Bot and human traffic separated by the tracking snippet
Crawl-to-visit funnel from bot visits to referred humans
Referral widgets for report decks
GA4 segments by source, medium, device, country and channel
Built for

Built for the teams that report the channel

Growth, SEO and AEO teams, and agencies.

Growth leads

Put a visitor count next to the AI search programme, not just a visibility score.

SEO and AEO teams

See which engines turn citations into clicks and which only crawl.

Agencies

Show clients the visitors AI answers send, in the same deck as their visibility.

Featured story

“We retired three legacy tools and rebuilt our launch motion around WriteWorks. We can finally see our share of voice on the engines our buyers ask, and prove the lift on every run.”

Read the full story
10+
AI platforms measured
Share of voice
Tracked vs competitors
Proven
Lift on every run
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams typically ask before getting started.

What is AI referral traffic?+
AI referral traffic is the set of visits that arrive on your site after someone clicks a link inside an AI answer, such as a ChatGPT or Perplexity response. It is different from AI crawler traffic, which is bots fetching your pages. WriteWorks counts the two separately.
How do you track AI traffic to a website?+
Install the WriteWorks tracking snippet. It classifies each request as a known AI crawler or a human visit, and records human visits with the source that referred them. The human visits view then shows AI-referred visits, the share of traffic from AI and the assistants sending people.
Can I see Perplexity referral traffic separately from ChatGPT?+
Yes. Referrals are broken down by platform, with sessions and share for each assistant that sent visitors, so Perplexity, ChatGPT and other sources appear as separate rows.
Does LLM traffic include bots like GPTBot?+
Not in the referral numbers. Requests that match the AI crawler registry are counted as crawler activity in the AI crawlers analytics, and only the remaining human visits count as referral traffic.
Can I report on AI referral traffic?+
Yes. The "Referred humans" and "Human referrals by source" widgets, plus the crawl-to-visit funnel, can be added to any WriteWorks report deck alongside visibility and Search Console data.
Explore more

Keep exploring

Related solutions, adjacent use cases, and platform features.

Pillar

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Related

See the visitors AI answers send you

Install one snippet and WriteWorks counts AI-referred visitors by assistant, with crawlers kept out of the numbers.

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