How to track AI traffic in GA4, Search Console and Microsoft Clarity

AI traffic is the visits your website receives when someone clicks a link in an answer from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Perplexity. Since May 2026, Google Analytics has had a channel for some of these visits, which makes it easier to track AI traffic in GA4. That channel has blind spots, though: it ignores older data and everything that comes from Google’s own AI features.

This tutorial fills those gaps with free tools, in six steps: the built-in channel, a channel group of your own for the history, the landing pages, Search Console and Bing for Google’s and Microsoft’s AI answers, Microsoft Clarity for behaviour, and finally the enquiries. It belongs to my guide to generative engine optimisation, which explains how to get mentioned in the first place.

Allow about forty minutes. You need edit rights on your GA4 property and access to Search Console. Menu names are those of the English interfaces in October 2026.

What counts as AI traffic, and which tool sees it

AI assistants do not all send visitors the same way, so no single report sees everything. Here is where each kind of AI visit ends up:

ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links people click in its answers, which makes it the easiest assistant to follow. Without a tag, GA4 relies on the referrer: the address of the page the visitor came from. A visit with neither lands in Direct, mixed with the people who typed your address.

Step 1: find the AI Assistant channel in GA4

Since 13 May 2026, GA4’s default channel group has included an AI Assistant channel. Google gives ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude as examples but has not published its full list, and reports disagree on whether Perplexity is in it (Google’s page on the default channel group).

1. Open Reports, then Traffic acquisition, usually under Acquisition.
2. Choose a date range of at least 28 days; on a small site, three months tells you more.
3. Find the AI Assistant row. Its sessions, engagement rate and key events sit in the same columns as your other channels.
4. Click the plus sign next to the first column’s title and add Session source as a secondary dimension (type “source” in the search box) to see which assistant sent each visit.

Two limits apply. The channel only sorts visits from 13 May 2026 onwards: earlier ones stay where GA4 filed them at the time, mostly in Referral or Unassigned, the bin for visits it cannot classify. And it leaves out AI Overviews and AI Mode, whose visits arrive as ordinary organic traffic from Google.

Step 2: track AI traffic in GA4 before May 2026 with a channel group

A custom channel group is your own version of GA4’s list of channels. Unlike the built-in channel, it also sorts the data collected before you created it, so your AI visits from before May 2026 appear, and you decide which assistants count (Google’s help on custom channel groups).

Create the group

In GA4, open Admin, then Channel groups under Data display, and create a new channel group. GA4 starts you with a copy of the default group. Give yours a name, for example “Channels with AI”. A standard GA4 property allows two custom channel groups, and this tutorial needs only one.

Add the AI channel

At the bottom of the channel list, click Add new channel and call it “AI assistants”. Set its condition to Source, choose matches regex and paste this value:

.*(chatgpt|chat\.openai|perplexity|claude\.ai|gemini\.google|copilot|deepseek|chat\.mistral|grok).*

The vertical bars mean “or”, and the backslashes make the dots literal, so claude\.ai only matches a source that contains claude.ai. To add an assistant later, type a bar and part of its address before the closing bracket. I left out openai.com and google.com on their own: they would also catch visitors from OpenAI’s and Google’s other websites.

Move it to the top of the list

Save the channel, then reorder the list to put “AI assistants” at the very top. GA4 reads the channels from top to bottom and files each visit under the first one that matches, so an AI channel placed below Referral would miss most of its visits. Then save the group.

Read it in your reports

Back in Traffic acquisition, click the first column’s title, which opens a drop-down, and pick your channel group instead of the default one. Set a date range that starts before 13 May 2026: the “AI assistants” row now shows the older visits too. Pick the group in the report like this rather than making it your primary channel group in Admin, because a primary group only applies from the day you set it.

Step 3: see which pages AI visitors land on

Knowing that ChatGPT sent you 14 visits matters less than knowing where it sent them. Those landing pages are the ones assistants pick for your subject, so they need to be accurate and up to date.

1. In Traffic acquisition, with your channel group in the first column, click the plus sign and type “landing” to add the landing page as a secondary dimension.
2. Look at the “AI assistants” rows: each one is a page these visitors arrived on.
3. Open each of those pages on your phone and read it as a stranger would. Are your prices or price range, the area you cover and the way to contact you clear within a few seconds?

If a page gets AI visits but no enquiries, look at it in Clarity (step 5) before you change anything else.

Step 4: check AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console

Visits from Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode reach your site as organic traffic from Google, so GA4 cannot tell them apart from ordinary search clicks. Search Console is the only place that shows how often Google’s AI features display your pages.

Google announced generative AI reports for Search Console on 3 June 2026, and every site has had them since 31 August 2026. They sit with the other Performance reports: one for Search, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode, and one for Discover.

1. Open your property, then the generative AI report for Search.
2. Sort the pages by impressions: these are the pages Google’s AI features show most often.
3. Filter on a country, such as the United Kingdom, if you only serve one market.
4. For clicks, go back to the main Performance report: clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Web search type (since June 2025 for AI Mode), mixed with ordinary results.

Read these reports with their limits in mind. They count impressions only, with no clicks, click-through rate, position or queries, and those impressions are already included in the Web search type, so do not add the two together. To set up Search Console from scratch, follow my step-by-step guide to Google Search Console; to be cited more often, read how to get your site cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

For Copilot: Bing Webmaster Tools

Microsoft’s counterpart is the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, in public preview since February 2026 and open to any verified site. It counts how often Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries cite your pages and lists the grounding queries, the searches the AI ran before answering. Like Google’s report, it has no clicks, and its data is sampled. If your site is already in Search Console, Bing can import it, so there is nothing new to verify.

Step 5: watch AI visitors in Microsoft Clarity

Since 29 August 2025, Clarity has sorted visits from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity into a channel of their own, AIPlatform, with PaidAIPlatform for paid traffic from them (Microsoft’s page on the AI channel group). Clarity uses its own list, so do not expect its figures to match GA4’s exactly.

I use Clarity to see where people engage, whether they came for something specific and what makes them leave, so I can fix it: the copy, a picture or the user experience. Visitors sent by an assistant arrive with a question already in mind, which makes their sessions quick to read.

1. Open your Clarity project’s Dashboard, go to the Channels tab of the card that lists your traffic sources (called Referrer or Traffic, depending on the version) and click AIPlatform. The dashboard then shows only these visits and the pages they read.
2. Apply the same filter in Recordings and watch five sessions.
3. Note where people stop scrolling, what they click and whether they reach your contact page or your phone number.
4. Fix the most common problem first, then come back a month later.

Clarity’s free Citations report, now generally available, measures something else: how often AI answers, mostly Copilot’s, cite your site. If Clarity is not on your site yet, my Microsoft Clarity tutorial covers the tracking code and the consent signal Clarity has needed for visitors from the UK and the EEA since 31 October 2025.

Step 6: count enquiries, not just visits

A visit is not a client. For Pilotech, the air conditioning installer whose website and SEO I look after, leads are measured in forms and calls. Apply the same measure to AI:

1. Make your enquiries key events. In GA4, open Admin > Data display > Events and switch on Mark as key event for the event your contact form sends. The Key events column of Traffic acquisition then shows enquiries for each channel, AI included. If your form sends no event yet, ask whoever built your site to add one. My tutorial on tracking your funnel with UTM links and GA4 shows which channel brings booked calls.
2. Ask every new contact how they found you. Add a “How did you hear about us?” field to your form, with an option such as “ChatGPT or another AI assistant”, and ask the same question on the phone. In my experience, people would rather call than write because it is quicker, and a call leaves no trace in GA4.
3. Watch the searches for your name. Someone who read about you in an answer may simply search for your business. The branded queries filter in the Performance report of Search Console separates those searches from the rest, so you can see whether they grow.

Why your AI figures are always too low

Treat every AI figure as a minimum, for four reasons:

• Missing tags and referrers. A visit with neither lands in Direct. From 9 October 2026, analytics firms reported a sharp fall in ChatGPT visits in GA4, by almost half on the sites one of them monitors, while Direct traffic rose: ChatGPT appears to have stopped tagging some of its links. OpenAI had announced no change when I wrote this. If your ChatGPT figures dropped that week, check Direct on the same landing pages before drawing conclusions.
• Cookie refusals. Visitors who refuse analytics cookies on your banner are not counted in the usual way, in GA4 or in Clarity. A banner set up with Consent Mode v2 passes each visitor’s choice to Google.
• Google’s AI features. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are mixed into organic search, and Search Console only shows their impressions.
• People who never click. They read your name in an answer, then call you or search for you a week later.

None of this makes the figures useless. A trend over several months tells you whether assistants are sending you more people, even if each figure is an underestimate.

Your monthly AI traffic check

Once everything is set up, ten minutes a month is enough:

1. GA4: visits and key events in your “AI assistants” channel, compared with the month before.
2. GA4: the landing pages these visits reach.
3. Search Console: impressions in the generative AI report, by page.
4. Bing Webmaster Tools: Copilot citations, if you added your site.
5. Clarity: five recordings from the AIPlatform channel.
6. Your enquiry log: the forms and calls that mention an assistant.

If the figures stay at zero for months, you have a visibility problem, not a measurement one. First see whether assistants mention you at all with my guide to checking your AI visibility, then work on getting recommended by ChatGPT. And keep it in proportion: if AI sends you a handful of visits a month, keep working the channels that already bring you clients rather than reorganising everything around a new one.