Visitors
A visitor, in the Trakkr sense, is a session whose connected analytics source identifies an AI referrer such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot. It is the arrival signal behind the Visited stage in a Page's Journey.
That sounds simple, but attribution depends on the source data that reaches Google Analytics. Some AI clients strip referrers or open links in ways that GA4 records as Direct. When that happens, neither GA4 nor Trakkr can honestly assign the session back to an AI tool.
Visitors keeps the AI sources GA4 can identify in one view and joins them to landing pages, engagement, key events, and revenue when those fields exist.
What's actually different about AI referral traffic
A click from ChatGPT and a click from Google look almost identical in your access logs. Same browser, same device, same landing page. The differences are subtle but they change what you should do with the data.
| Behaviour | Search visitor | AI visitor |
|---|---|---|
| Intent at the moment of click | Browsing a list of options | Already partway through making a decision |
| Time spent before clicking | Seconds | Often minutes inside the AI tool first |
| What they know about you | The headline and meta description | Whatever the AI synthesized from your content |
| How they arrived | Clean referrer, UTMs preserved | Referrer often missing or generic, UTMs frequently stripped |
| What Trakkr can measure | Search source and landing page | AI source and landing page when the referrer survives |
By the time someone clicks through from an AI answer, they have already read a summary or recommendation. That often makes these sessions worth inspecting even when the volume is small. Use your own conversion data rather than assuming they will convert at a fixed rate.
Why it's hard to measure
The honest answer: AI tools are not built with attribution in mind, and the picture is changing month to month. The four blockers you'll keep running into:
- UTMs get stripped. ChatGPT in particular often removes query parameters from outbound links. Anything you tagged on your site only survives if the AI tool decided to keep it.
- Referrers go missing. Some AI clients open links in a way that drops the
Refererheader entirely. In GA4, those visits land in "Direct / None." - Source names are inconsistent. Sometimes you see
chatgpt.com, sometimesopenai.com, sometimes a fresh subdomain after a product launch. A simple GA4 filter on one string misses the others. - Multi-step journeys are common. A visitor might land via ChatGPT, leave, return direct the next day, and convert. A session-source view cannot prove that the first visit caused the later conversion.
The result is a known undercount. Trakkr normalizes the AI source names that GA4 does capture, but it does not relabel Direct sessions as AI traffic without evidence.
How Trakkr measures it
Visitors is a layer on top of your existing Google Analytics 4 property. You connect once via OAuth, and Trakkr reads visit data through the GA4 Data API. Nothing is intercepted in the browser, and Trakkr adds no script to your site.
What Trakkr does that GA4 alone won't:
- Matches referrers and source/medium strings against a maintained pattern set covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, You.com, Phind, Poe, and the long tail.
- Catches new AI hostnames as providers ship them, so a launch like a new ChatGPT domain doesn't quietly drop out of your numbers.
- Groups source variants such as ChatGPT and OpenAI hostnames under one readable source.
- Shows the landing pages, geography, devices, engagement, key events, and revenue fields returned by the connected property.
Connecting Google Analytics
You need a GA4 property (not Universal Analytics, which Google sunset in 2024) and editor or admin access to it. The connection is OAuth, one click after you've signed into your Google account.
- Open Visitors in the sidebar
- Click Connect Google Analytics
- Sign into the Google account that has access to the property
- Pick the property that matches your brand's domain
- Trakkr loads the selected date window and caches the report for up to four hours
Access is read-only at the GA4 level: Trakkr can see traffic data, nothing else. If you disconnect, the read access is revoked at Google's side.
If you manage multiple brands, each brand connects to its own GA4 property. Teammates who want to see Visitors for a brand they didn't connect just need to inherit access through team roles, they don't need to re-OAuth.
Reading the dashboard
Once data is flowing, the dashboard has two tabs that share the same date range, source filter, and AI taxonomy.
Traffic tab
The default view, organised around three questions.
- How much AI traffic am I getting? Hero stats at the top: total AI visits, change vs the previous period, share of overall traffic.
- Where is it coming from? Stacked chart and source filter for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and the rest. Click a source to isolate it.
- What are they landing on? Top pages ranked by AI sessions, with the source breakdown for each one.
Two side panels round it out: a Geo panel showing where visitors are coming from globally, and a Devices and sources breakdown when you need to slice further.
Conversions tab
Same visitors, viewed through the lens of what they did on your site. Pulls in the events you already track in GA4, plus optional revenue values you can set per event.
- Hero stats: total AI-driven conversions, conversion rate, AI-attributed revenue.
- Funnel: a multi-step funnel built from your own events (signup, trial start, paid, whatever you instrument), with conversion percentages at each step broken out by AI source.
- Sources by revenue: which AI tools are sending the visitors who actually convert, not just the visitors who arrive.
The Conversions tab is the answer to "is AI sending real customers, or just curious browsers?"
Traffic settings
The gear in the header opens Traffic settings, the one place that controls what the numbers mean for this brand.
- Connection. See the connected property, switch to a different property without losing your saved configuration, or disconnect.
- Hostnames. GA4 properties often collect traffic from more than one site: a support portal, a docs subdomain, a sub-product on the same tag. The settings list every hostname your property reported in the last 28 days with its session count. Untick one and it is left out of all AI traffic reporting for the brand, including totals, so the AI share stays honest. The header shows a note whenever a hostname is excluded, so filtered numbers never look like the full property.
- AI sources. The current list of platforms Trakkr counts as AI traffic, kept up to date as providers ship new domains. Turn one off for this brand, or add a custom pattern to count something the list can't know about, like an internal AI gateway.
Pinned events, funnel steps, and event values stay on the Conversions tab, next to the charts they shape.
What to do with the data
Visitor data is most useful when you use it to feed decisions in the rest of the platform. A few moves that consistently produce something useful:
- Find your AI landing pages. Sort the Top Pages table by AI sessions. These are the URLs AI is sending people to. Treat them like landing pages: make sure they answer the implicit question and have a clear next action.
- Compare landing pages with citations. When ChatGPT traffic surges on a page, open Citations and check which monitored answers cite that URL. Treat the relationship as a clue, not proof of which answer produced each session.
- Stop tagging links from inside your AI content for attribution. UTMs you add to your own site won't survive an AI tool rewriting the URL. Tag for your own analytics, but don't rely on UTMs to identify AI as the source.
- Keep Direct unassigned. Some Direct sessions may have come from an AI tool, but the missing referrer means there is no honest way to count them. Use the visible AI total as a lower bound.
- Use AI traffic to score content quality. Pages with strong crawler activity (see Crawlers) and weak visitor numbers are the ones to rework. Either AI isn't surfacing them or the snippet isn't compelling enough to earn the click.
Common questions
Why is my number lower in Trakkr than in GA4?
You're probably comparing different filters. Trakkr counts visits that match its AI source pattern set; raw GA4 reports often include "AI search" buckets that mix in real AI tools with regular search engines that have an AI feature. If the gap looks large, check whether your GA4 number is filtered to specific sources or includes a broader bucket.
Can I track AI visitors without GA4?
Not through the standard Visitors connection. Visitors reads GA4 sessions, engagement, key events, and revenue. If you do not have GA4, connect it from the Visitors setup screen.
Does Trakkr modify my GA4 setup?
No. The connection is read-only. Trakkr never writes back, never creates events, never modifies properties. If you revoke access in Google's security panel, the connection drops cleanly.
How fresh is the data?
Reports are cached for up to four hours. Click Refresh to request a fresh report. GA4 can also lag recent activity, so a click that happened a few minutes ago may not appear yet.
What if AI traffic just shows as "Direct"?
Some of it always will, particularly clicks from clients that strip referrers. Trakkr does not guess. Those sessions remain Direct, and the AI visitor total should be read as a lower bound.
Does this work in white-label client portals?
Yes. Visitors data is brand-scoped, so each connected brand has its own dashboard. Portal users see the dashboard exactly as you do, just under your branding.