AI Traffic
See when visitors and buyers come through AI — as a referral from an AI answer, an AI ad, or an AI agent — instead of losing them to "Direct".
More and more people reach shops through AI: they follow a link in a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer, click an ad inside an AI product, or an assistant buys on their behalf. Tugus separates each of these into its own channel — so this traffic shows up as what it is, instead of disappearing into "Direct".
The four ways AI shows up
| Channel | What it is | How it's recognized |
|---|---|---|
AI referral (ai_referral) | A person follows a link or citation in an AI answer (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini …). | The AI's utm_source or referrer host. |
AI advertising (ai_ads) | A paid click on an ad inside an AI product (e.g. ChatGPT ads). | The ad's click reference. |
AI agent (ai_agent) | Agentic commerce — an AI assistant acts (and often buys) on a person's behalf. | The agent's signature on the server-side request. |
| AI crawler | A bot that indexes your site for an AI (GPTBot, ClaudeBot …). | The bot's user agent — filtered as invalid traffic, never counted as a visit. |
The first three are real, attributable channels and appear in your traffic sources breakdown next to Paid Search, Social and the rest. The fourth is a bot and is kept out of your numbers on purpose.
Which AI sent them
AI referrals carry a second dimension, AI source (ai_source) — which
assistant the visitor came from: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot,
DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI, Le Chat, You.com, Poe, Phind, and more.
- Break it down — group any metric (visitors, purchases, revenue) by AI source to see which assistant drives the most traffic or sales.
- Filter to one — narrow any report to a single AI (e.g. only ChatGPT), and combine it with any other breakdown, filter or time range.
Both work in the Explorer and through the AI assistant (MCP).
Where to see it
- Traffic sources — the channel breakdown shows
AI referral,AI advertisingandAI agentas their own rows. - Explorer — break down or filter by AI source for the per-assistant view.
- Customer journeys — AI touchpoints appear in the path, so you can see AI's role early in the journey, not just at the last click.
An honest limit — "dark" AI traffic. Roughly 35–70% of AI referrals arrive with no referrer and no tag, so they can't be identified and still count as "Direct". This is a limitation of how browsers and AI products pass (or drop) that information — every analytics tool, GA4 included, has the same gap. The AI numbers Tugus shows are therefore a lower bound, not the full picture.
AI referral is recognized from data Tugus already stores — no extra tracking code and no change to your script. It works retroactively on the traffic you've already collected.