AI referral
An AI referral is one visit to your website by a person who clicked a link in an AI assistant's answer, as opposed to a visit by a bot.
An AI referral is a single visit to your website from a person who came from an AI answer. They asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or another assistant a question, saw a link to your site, and clicked it. Add up all those visits and you get your AI referral traffic.
The word that matters is person. AI platforms also visit your site with bots, to read pages for training or for answers. Those are bot visits, and they're a different thing.
Person or bot?
Both start with an AI company, which is why they get mixed up. Here's how to tell them apart:
- A referral is a person in a browser. They run your analytics script, so tools like Google Analytics see them, usually with
chatgpt.comorperplexity.aias the referrer. - A bot visit is software. Bots rarely run your analytics script, so they don't show up in Google Analytics. You see them in your server logs, under names like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
For example, say Perplexity's bot reads Fernhill Coffee's subscription page on Monday. On Tuesday, Perplexity cites that page in an answer, and a reader clicks through and signs up. Monday's visit was a bot. Tuesday's was an AI referral, and it's the one that led to a sale.
Why some referrals go missing
Not every person who comes from an answer is counted as a referral. If they copy a link into a new tab, or the app opens it without passing on where it came from, the visit shows up as direct traffic. And many people read the answer, remember your name, and search for you later. So treat AI referrals as a floor: the visits you can prove.
In AnswerOrbit
The AI traffic tab in Website shows the people AI assistants sent to your site, from Google Analytics, by assistant, landing page, country and device. The Bot visits tab shows the bots, from your server logs.