Dark traffic
Dark traffic is visits that arrive with no record of where they came from, so your analytics files them as direct.
Dark traffic is visits to your website that arrive with no record of where they came from. Your analytics can't tell their source, so it files them as direct, as if the person had typed your address.
Some of those visits come from AI assistants. That means the AI traffic in your analytics is likely lower than the visits AI really sends you.
Where it comes from
When someone clicks a link, their browser usually tells your site which page they came from. That's the referrer. Dark traffic happens when the referrer is missing.
Common causes:
- Links opened from apps, like chat apps, email apps and some AI assistant apps
- Links copied out of an answer and pasted into a new tab
- Links shared in private messages
- Sites and apps that choose not to pass a referrer on
How to spot it
Look at direct traffic to pages nobody would type in. Someone may type your home page, but almost nobody types fernhill.com/guides/office-coffee-per-person from memory.
For example, Fernhill's office coffee guide gets 600 direct visits a month, more than its home page. Nobody bookmarks that page, and Fernhill doesn't email it out. Yet it's cited often in AI answers about office coffee. A good share of those direct visits are probably people coming from those answers.
Other clues: a rise in direct traffic to a page soon after its citations rise, and customers who say "ChatGPT recommended you" in a "how did you hear about us?" box.
In AnswerOrbit
The AI traffic tab in Website shows the visits AI assistants sent your site, from Google Analytics. It can only count visits that Google Analytics can tell came from an assistant, so dark traffic isn't in it. The Pages tab puts each page's AI visits next to how often answers used and cited it, which helps you spot pages that are cited often and get suspiciously few AI visits.