AI referral traffic
The visits people make to your website after clicking a link in an AI assistant's answer.
AI referral traffic is the visits people make to your website after clicking a link in an AI assistant's answer, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot or another assistant. It's the part of AI search you can see in your own analytics: the people who read an answer and came to your site.
How it's measured
When someone clicks a link in an assistant, their browser usually tells your site where they came from, in the referrer. Your analytics groups visits by that source. A visit whose referrer is chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, for example, is AI referral traffic.
Some visits arrive with no referrer at all, for example when someone copies a link out of an answer and pastes it into a new tab. Those show up as direct traffic, so AI referral traffic is usually lower than the visits AI really sends you.
Why it's only part of the picture
Many people read an AI answer and never click. They get what they need from the answer itself, or they search for your brand later. So a brand can be named often in answers and still see few visits from them.
That's why it helps to track two things side by side: how often the platforms name you, and how many people they send you. For example, if your visibility on a topic goes up and your AI visits to that topic's pages go up the next weeks too, the answers are working for you.
In AnswerOrbit
The AI traffic tab in Website shows the people AI assistants sent to your site, from Google Analytics: your AI visits against the week before, by assistant, landing page, country and device. If you've set up key events, you'll also see an engagement rate, a conversion rate and revenue. To see it, connect Google Analytics. See Website and AI traffic.
The Pages tab puts a page's AI visits next to how often answers used and cited it.