Google Analytics
Google Analytics is Google's free tool for measuring who visits your website, where they came from and what they did there.
Google Analytics is Google's free tool for measuring the visits to your website: how many people came, where they came from, which pages they read and whether they bought or signed up. You add a small piece of code to your pages, and Google turns what it collects into reports.
For most marketers it's where the question "is this working?" gets answered. Search, ads, email and social all show up as sources of visits, so you can compare them side by side.
Where AI visits show up
People who click a link in an AI answer arrive at your site like any other visitor, and Google Analytics records where they came from. Google Analytics 4 now has a default AI Assistant channel that groups visits from assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot.
Some AI visits land elsewhere. Clicks from Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode count as organic search. Someone who read an answer and then typed your address counts as direct. So the AI number in Google Analytics is the visits it could recognise, and the real figure is usually higher.
What it can't tell you
Google Analytics only sees people who reached your site. It can't tell you how often an AI answer named you and nobody clicked, or which competitor it recommended instead. For example, Fernhill Coffee might see 300 visits from ChatGPT last month and feel fine, while ChatGPT named Kestrel Roasters in twice as many answers. You need both views: what the answers say, and what the visitors do.
In AnswerOrbit
Connect Google Analytics in Settings, under Connections. The AI traffic tab in Website then shows the people AI assistants sent you, 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. The Pages tab adds each page's AI visits next to how often the answers used it. See Website and AI traffic.