How to track ChatGPT referral traffic in GA4

Where does ChatGPT traffic appear in GA4?

ChatGPT visits appear under Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition, with a session source of chatgpt.com and, by default, a channel of Referral. Older visits may show chat.openai.com, the domain ChatGPT used before it moved.

The other AI assistants follow the same pattern, each with its own source:

How to filter the report to AI assistants

Add a filter on Session source that matches a regular expression listing the assistants. It takes about a minute:

1. Open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
2. Change the table’s primary dimension to Session source.
3. Click Add filter, choose Session source, set the match type to matches regex, and paste the expression below.
4. Apply, and widen the date range to at least 28 days so the numbers mean something.

.*(chatgpt\.com|openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|claude\.ai|copilot\.microsoft\.com).*

The leading and trailing .* matter, because GA4’s regex conditions match the whole value rather than any part of it.

How to give AI assistants their own channel

Create a custom channel group with an AI assistants channel above Referral, so every report that groups by channel shows AI traffic as its own row:

1. Go to Admin → Data display → Channel groups, and create a new channel group.
2. Add a channel named AI assistants, with the condition Source matches regex and the expression above.
3. Drag it above Referral. GA4 assigns a session to the first channel whose rule it matches, so below Referral it would never receive anything.
4. Save, then pick the new group in the Traffic acquisition report.

Google notes that custom channel groups can be applied to reports retroactively, so the new row also fills in for past months.

What GA4 cannot show you

GA4 undercounts AI traffic and cannot see AI crawlers at all. Three gaps remain after the setup above:

• Visits with no referrer, from the ChatGPT apps or copied links, land in Direct and cannot be recovered after the fact.
• Visitors who decline cookies may not be counted at all under consent mode, depending on your setup.
• Crawls. OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot never run the tag, so GA4 cannot tell you whether the engines have read the pages they would cite. See how to track AI crawlers.

The shortcut

CrawlRadar’s tracking tag classifies AI referrals out of the box, cookieless, and reports the pages each assistant sends people to, next to the AI crawler visits its collector records from your server. Add your website to see both, or keep the GA4 setup above if referrals are all you need.

Sources

• Google Analytics Help, Custom channel groups in GA4.
• Google Analytics Help, Default channel group: how Referral and Direct are assigned.
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers: why ChatGPT’s crawlers never appear in GA4.

Frequently asked questions