Tracking visits from ChatGPT and Perplexity

Being cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity is good. Knowing how many people then click through to your site is better. The assistants do not publish these figures: only your own site sees the visits. Here is how to spot them.

The two signals to look at

Signal	Example	Reliability
utm_source parameter added to the link	?utm_source=chatgpt.com	Good when present
Where the visit came from (referrer)	perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, claude.ai, chat.mistral.ai	Variable: sometimes hidden

Table compiled on 26 September 2026.

ChatGPT adds the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter to the links in its search answers, which makes these visits easy to spot in your analytics. For the other assistants, you rely on the referrer when the browser passes it on.

The limits to know about

• Mobile apps and some browsers hide the origin: some visits arrive as “direct”. The figures are therefore a minimum.
• Google AI Overviews cannot be told apart: those clicks come from google.com like ordinary search clicks, and Google includes them in the overall search traffic in Search Console.
• A click is not a customer: also look at the landing pages and the enquiries.

In Google Analytics

In GA4, the “Traffic acquisition” report lets you filter sources containing chatgpt, perplexity or gemini. It is a good cross-check, but it has to be done by hand, source by source.

With Recoia

Recoia’s visits section automatically counts visits from AI assistants thanks to a small snippet you paste on your site:

• no cookie and no personal data: only the day, the assistant and the landing page are counted;
• a chart per week and per assistant;
• landing pages compared with the pages the AI assistants cite.

You see the full path: the question asked, the citation, then the visit.

Updated 26 September 2026.