AI Referrals

AI Referrals shows the website traffic your brand gets from AI assistants, connected directly to your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property.

While the rest of Cite AI tracks how often your brand gets mentioned or cited inside AI responses, AI Referrals tracks what happens next. It shows whether that visibility turns into visits to your site, and whether those visitors engage with your content.

AI Referrals is located within Agent Analytics, alongside Crawl Insights and Crawlability. While Crawl Insights and Crawlability monitor bot activity, AI Referrals focuses on human visits.

Overview

The Overview tab opens with three filters: date range, AI assistant, and country. These scope everything below them.

Above the KPI cards, a headline calls out the leading assistant for the selected period, for example “ChatGPT drove 45% of AI-referred sessions,” with the session count displayed directly underneath it.

KPI card	What it shows
Sessions	Total AI-referred sessions in the period, with percent change against the prior period
Conversions	Key events fired by AI-referred sessions
Conversion rate	Share of sessions with one or more conversions
Engagement rate	Share of sessions that were engaged
Revenue	Purchase revenue from AI-referred sessions

Below the KPI cards, a line chart breaks sessions out by AI assistant (ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and others), with daily, weekly, and monthly toggles and a metric selector. Further down, the tab breaks traffic out by source, landing page, country, and device.

Cite AI combines GA4’s native AI-assistant classification with its own regex-based detection, so referrals get caught even where GA4’s default grouping misses them.

Conversions, Conversion rate, and Revenue only populate for accounts with the matching GA4 setup: key events and, for revenue, e-commerce tracking. Without that, these fields show empty.

Metrics

Metric	Definition
Sessions	A visit that starts when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight. Can include multiple page views and events. Only sessions attributed to an AI assistant count here.
Session starts	A GA4 event marking the start of an active visit. Often differs slightly from Sessions, partly because GA4 sometimes logs a session without logging the start event.
Conversions	A key event, as defined in your GA4 account: a purchase, a form submission, a signup.
Conversion rate	The percentage of sessions with one or more conversions. GA4 calls this the session key event rate. Shows no data until you mark an event as a key event.
Engagement rate	The percentage of engaged sessions: sessions lasting 10 seconds or more, sessions with a conversion, or sessions with two or more page views.
Avg. engagement time	The average length of time your site stayed in focus in the visitor’s browser.
Revenue	Total purchase revenue from AI-referred sessions, minus refunds. Only shows if your GA4 property tracks purchase revenue.

Details

The Details tab has two parts: Channels and Landing pages.

Channels

Channel	Note
AI Assistants	The AI-referred sessions shown throughout this feature
Organic Search	Google AI Overviews and AI Mode results are classified by GA4 as organic search rather than AI referrals; as a result, this channel may contain AI-driven traffic not listed under AI Assistants.
Direct	Mobile AI apps, or links opened from an AI tool without a referrer header, land here instead of under AI Assistants
Paid Search	Traffic from search ads, shown for comparison

Landing pages

Breaks AI-referred traffic down by landing page, toggled between URLs and paths, with two views.

View	Scope	Metrics shown
Event page	Event-scoped, attributed directly to the URL	Events, Session starts, Conversions, Revenue
Session path	Mix of session- and event-scoped, attributed to the page GA4 credited for the session	Sessions, Session starts, Engagement rate, Avg. engagement time, Conversions, Conversion rate, Revenue

If a transaction occurs on a different URL within the same session, Session path view will still credit it to the initial landing page. Consequently, the two views may report different metrics for the same page.

The Landing pages table is a floor, not a ceiling. Some AI referrals never get attributed as such by Google Analytics, so this represents the minimum AI-driven traffic Cite AI can capture.

Settings

Setting	What it does
Connection	Shows the connected Google account, GA4 property (with account name), and data stream (with measurement ID)
Reauthentication	Refreshes the Google connection, keeping the same property and stream
Danger zone	Permanently deletes all AI Referrals data and removes the integration

Connecting your data

Go to AI Referrals and click Connect. Sign in through Google OAuth and grant access. This is read-only: no Property ID entry, no JWT.

Select the GA4 property you want to connect. Cite AI supports one GA4 property per project. To switch properties, reconnect or disconnect from Settings at any time.

On first connection, Cite AI backfills the last 4 calendar weeks plus the current week to date.

Tracked AI assistants

Source domain	AI assistant	Platform
chatgpt.com	ChatGPT	OpenAI
chat.openai.com	ChatGPT	OpenAI
claude.ai	Claude	Anthropic
gemini.google.com	Gemini	Google
bard.google.com	Gemini	Google
perplexity.ai	Perplexity	Perplexity
copilot.microsoft.com	Copilot	Microsoft
copilot.cloud.microsoft	Copilot	Microsoft
edgeservices.bing.com	Copilot	Microsoft
link.edgepilot.com	Copilot	Microsoft
grok.com	Grok	xAI
meta.ai	Meta AI	Meta
you.com	You.com	You.com
chat.mistral.ai	Le Chat	Mistral AI
chat.deepseek.com	DeepSeek	DeepSeek
duck.ai	Duck.ai	DuckDuckGo
iask.ai	iAsk	IAsk AI
phind.com	Phind	Phind
poe.com	Poe	Quora
hey.pi.ai	Pi	Inflection AI
huggingface.co	Hugging Face	Hugging Face
consensus.app	Consensus	Consensus
andisearch.com	Andi	Andi
felo.ai	Felo	Felo Search
lmarena.ai	Arena	Arena Intelligence
arena.ai	Arena	Arena Intelligence
openrouter.ai	OpenRouter	OpenRouter
monica.im	Monica	Monica AI
sider.ai	Sider	Sider.AI
chat.baidu.com	Ernie	Baidu
ernie.baidu.com	Ernie	Baidu
yiyan.baidu.com	Ernie	Baidu
doubao.com	Doubao	ByteDance
chatglm.cn	ChatGLM	Zhipu AI
kimi.ai	Kimi	Moonshot AI
kimi.com	Kimi	Moonshot AI
tongyi.aliyun.com	Qwen	Alibaba
tongyi.com	Qwen	Alibaba
qianwen.com	Qwen	Alibaba
qwen.ai	Qwen	Alibaba
chat.qwenlm.ai	Qwen	Alibaba
ying.baichuan-ai.com	Baichuan	Baichuan Inc
yuanbao.tencent.com	Yuanbao	Tencent
chat.z.ai	Z.ai	Zhipu AI
agent.minimax.io	MiniMax	MiniMax
adot.ai	A.	SK Telecom
ai.ionos.de	IONOS	IONOS
alexaplus.com	Alexa+	Amazon
app.sigmabrowser.com	Sigma	SigmaBrowser
askgpt.app	AskGPT	AskGPT
blackbox.ai	BLACKBOX.AI	BlackBox
chatbotapp.ai	Chatbot App	Chatbot App
chathub.gg	ChatHub	ChatHub
easemate.ai	EaseMate AI	EaseMate AI
exa.ai	exa	Exa Labs
metaphor.systems	exa	Exa Labs
galaxy.ai	Magica	GalaxyAI
magica.com	Magica	GalaxyAI
aymo.ai	Ayimo.ai	Ayimo AI
liner.com	Liner	Liner
getmerlin.in	Merlin	Foyer Tech Inc.
glbgpt.com	GlobalGPT	Future Share LLC.
go.welt.de	WELTgo!	Axel Springer
hey.bild.de	Hey_	Axel Springer
intric.ai	intric	Intric AB
jan.ai	Jan	Menlo
magai.co	Magai	SoVisual.co LLC
mammouth.ai	MAMMOUTH	Mammouth AI
ninjachat.ai	ninjachat	NinjaChat AI
quillbot.com	quillbot	Learneo
rogo.ai	rogo	ROGO AI
scout.yahoo.com	Yahoo Scout	Yahoo
teamai.com	TeamAI	TeamAI
thinkany.ai	ThinkAny	ThinkAny
typingmind.com	TypingMind	TypingMind
venice.ai	Venice	Venice AI
writingmate.ai	Writingmate	Writingmate
yeschat.ai	YesChat AI	YESCHATAI