How to Track and Analyze Your AI Traffic

AI is already a pretty formidable new growth channel, driving brand interest through mentions and even direct product/service recommendations.

But its value goes beyond just awareness—AI citations can also drive engaged traffic to your site.

Like any new referral channel, AI traffic is still finding its footing. Our research shows LLMs account for about 0.1% of traffic, though this figure is likely vastly underestimated due to AI platforms withholding referral source data.

As the technology evolves and user behavior adapts, AI traffic patterns will inevitably shift even further.

Monitoring will help you stay on top of changes and make the most of any growth.

Here’s how to track your AI traffic in GA4 and Ahrefs Web Analytics.

You can track your AI traffic in Google Analytics 4 by setting up a new channel and source.

Track AI as a traffic channel

Good AI traffic reports should be easy to dip in and out of, and understand at a peek.

To make that happen, start by setting up a channel group.

1. Find channel groups in admin

Head to Admin in GA4. Then, under “Data Display” ¹, select “Channel Groups” ².

Find the default channel group, then click on the three-dot menu next to it³ and choose “copy to create new”:

2. Create a new AI channel group and AI channel

Next, you need to:

Name your new group “Channel group with AI”
Click “add new channel” and call it “AI traffic”
Set the condition “source” then select “matches regex”
Paste this regular expression to track common AI platforms: .*chatgpt.com.*|.*perplexity.*|.*gemini.google.com.*|.*copilot.microsoft.com.*|.*openai.com.*|.*claude.ai.*|.*writesonic.com.*|.*copy.ai.*|.*deepseek.com.*|.*huggingface.co.*|.*bard.google.com*

This regex will pull in traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot, and more.

Then all that’s left to do is view your AI report.

3. View your AI traffic

Head to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, and make sure you select “Channel group with AI” at the top of the table.

This will show you your top-level AI traffic vs. other channels.

Track different AI traffic sources

Once you can see your top-level AI traffic, you’ll inevitably want to go deeper, to find out which AI platforms are sending it.

Here’s how to do that.

1. Create a custom “AI traffic sources” segment that you can revisit

Head to the “Explore” tab, then:

Start a new exploration
Click the “+” icon next to “Segments”
Click “create a new segment”
Click on “Session segment”
Define your segment. It should look like this:
- Include sessions when:
- “Traffic source”
- “Matches regex”
Paste the same regex you added to create your channel report:
.*chatgpt.com.*|.*perplexity.*|.*gemini.google.com.*|.*copilot.microsoft.com.*|.*openai.com.*|.*claude.ai.*|.*writesonic.com.*|.*copy.ai.*|.*deepseek.com.*|.*huggingface.co.*|.*bard.google.com*

Name this segment “AI traffic source”
Click “Apply”
Your new custom segment should now be visible under “Segments” on the far left (above “Dimensions”)

Once your revisitable “AI traffic sources” are set up, it’s time to start reporting.

2. View your “AI traffic sources” trended over time

To configure your report:

Set dimension: Choose “Traffic source”
Set metrics: Choose “Sessions”
Set visualization: Choose the line chart icon
Set breakdown: Choose “Session source/Medium” as the breakdown dimension
Set values: Choose “Sessions”
Adjust the date range: Choose your preferred date range
Set the granularity: Choose daily, weekly, or monthly

Or, instead of all that jiggery-pokery and manual configuration, you can just view a pre-built report in Ahrefs Web Analytics…

Ahrefs Web Analytics is a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.

Here are three ways it compares with GA4:

Easier: In seconds, Web Analytics gives you access to fully configured reports (e.g. top channels, sources, pages, regions, devices) that would take much longer to build in GA4.
Faster: Google Analytics delays visitor data by 24-48 hours. Ahrefs Web Analytics shows events within 1 minute, giving you real-time visitor insights.
Lighter: Google Tag Manager weighs ≈98kb and can grow with updates. Our script stays under 2kb, ensuring your site remains fast and efficient.

Once you’ve added a snippet of code to your site, viewing your AI traffic in Ahrefs Web Analytics is as easy as clicking a button.

Here’s a quick video of how you can set that up.

Now let’s get into some deep-dive AI traffic analysis.

For the rest of this article, we’ll be focusing on different Ahrefs Web Analytics reports and use cases.

Ahrefs Brand Radar—see below), to build a fuller picture of your AI awareness.

A “Competitive Share” view in Ahrefs Brand Radar, showing “Percentage of brand mentions in AI Overviews, based on total competitive scope.”

optimizing for speed.

Once you’ve experimented, feed all of your findings into internal brand and content guidelines, to standardize what “AI-friendly” content looks like, and give your team a repeatable playbook for LLM visibility.

Test how quickly your content gets picked up by AI, with hourly tracking

AI platforms can surface and cite new content surprisingly quickly. If you need to boost your brand visibility fast, then AI can make for a good channel.

Using Ahrefs Web Analytics’ real-time reporting, you can monitor AI traffic changes hour-by-hour after publishing.

For instance, in January this year, I posted an article on the fastest growing companies to the blog at 8.52am.

Going by Web Analytics data, the first AI visit we received came in at 2pm later that day.

This kind of analysis can help you test out which content types and tactics drive quick-turnaround AI visibility—especially useful for reactive campaigns, building brand visibility alongside developing news, or just refreshing to check your blog post stats after it goes live (guilty!).

AI traffic data can tell you a lot about your audience. Use Ahrefs Web Analytics to find out where they are and how they’re reaching your site.

Location and usage insights

From your dashboard, make sure you’ve got your “LLM” channel filter on, then scroll down to the bottom of your report to the “geography” component.

This data will show you which continent, country, or city your AI audience is visiting from, and what language they speak.

Next to that report, you’ll see the “browser & systems” component. This shows you which browsers, operating systems, and devices your AI audience are using.

To get really granular, you can also add additional “source” or “page” filters, to see how audience locations, browsers, and systems change based on AI platform or content.

Optimize content for specific regions

The “Geography” report in Ahrefs Web Analytics can show you where your AI audience lives and what languages they speak.

If AI traffic is clustering in your non-primary markets, think about creating region-specific versions of those popular pages, but targeting your key markets.

This way you can use ready-working formulas to expand your brand footprint in the markets most important to you.

Wrapping up

AI is changing how people discover and interact with online content. The question isn’t whether AI traffic matters—it’s how you can make it work for you.

By tracking it properly, you can figure out which AI platforms are sending visitors to your site, zero-in on how those visitors behave, then optimize your content in response.

Whether you’re using GA4 or Ahrefs Web Analytics, you need to make sure you track your AI traffic consistently. Start reporting now to see which pieces of content earn you the most engagement, then use those insights to develop your marketing strategy.

Don’t wait for AI traffic to pick up before you start tracking it—get ahead of the market and your competition. There’s probably already some great opportunities hiding in your analytics data.