AI isn’t going away, in fact it is picking up momentum and we’d be silly to think it won’t impact how people search for businesses online. Here at GCD, we want to be as proactive as possible, so to start to understand AI Traffic coming to our websites we have put together a super easy AI Traffic Report in GA4 (Google Analytics).
This report takes maybe 5 minutes to create, depending on your skill level with GA4. It’ll show you what LLM’s (large language models) are sending traffic to your website and to what pages. This will help you start to understand what types of content people searching via AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity are looking for.
The key to this report is the regex filter used – this may need to be updated as new LLM’s come to the party, if so, I will update this post and the below regex as needed. Here is the current regex I am using:
.*chatgpt.com.*|.*perplexity.*|.*edgeservices.*|.*copilot.microsoft.com.*|.*openai.com.*|.*gemini.google.com.*|.*nimble.ai.*|.*iask.ai.*|.*claude.ai.*|.*aitastic.app.*|.*bnngpt.com.*|.*writesonic.com.*|.*copy.ai.*|.*chat-gpt.org.*
You can clearly see what LLM’s this covers. If reading this blog post isn’t your speed, then follow along the instructions via this Youtube video:
Okay so let’s delve into creating this report, step by step.
Step 1: Create a customised report off your Traffic Acquisition report
Head to your Traffic Acquisition report and click the pencil icon in the top righthand corner to ‘Customise Report’.
Step 2: Customise the report
Now you can customise your report, this is what I would recommend but feel free to customise it to the data that is going to best help your business.
Dimensions: Set Session source as the default and click apply.
Metrics: These are totally up to what you need, I like to include: sessions, views, total users, engagement rate, event count, key events, session key event rate and revenue (if ecommerce) at a minimum.
Report filer: This is where you add the regex mentioned above. So set the dimension to Session source, the match type to matches regex and for the value paste in:
.*chatgpt.com.*|.*perplexity.*|.*edgeservices.*|.*copilot.microsoft.com.*|.*openai.com.*|.*gemini.google.com.*|.*nimble.ai.*|.*iask.ai.*|.*claude.ai.*|.*aitastic.app.*|.*bnngpt.com.*|.*writesonic.com.*|.*copy.ai.*|.*chat-gpt.org.*
And then click apply.
Next I would recommend to add an extra dimension for landing pages, so you can see where this AI traffic is clicking through to. To do this you want want to click the + symbol as shown below. When the search box pops open search for Landing Page + Query string.
That is the basics of the report customised! Feel free to customise anything else to suit you. Here is what mine looks like at this stage:
Step 2: Save as a ‘New Report’
This is important, you don’t want to save over the current Traffic Acquisition report – it’s best to save as a new report and call it something like AI Traffic.
I also add the regex to the description and the date I added it, so I can easily keep track and update it. This is not necessary though, just pedantic for analytics nerds like me!
Step 3: Add your report to you main GA4 navigation
To make your report easily accessible, make sure to add it to your main navigation. You can do this by going to the Library (you’ll find this at the bottom of the reports menu) and adding it to a spot in your reports menu which is easy for you.
I suggest to add it under your Acquisition section:
When you save the above, make sure you save it to the current collection – so you don’t create a whole new collection.
Step 4: Enjoy your AI Traffic report in GA4
And that’s it folks – you now have your very own AI Traffic report in GA4 – easy right 😉
If you have any questions about creating an AI Traffic report in GA4, please feel free to contact me today!
Quick Troubleshooting Guide
Problem: No AI traffic showing in report
Solutions:
- Check date range – try last 12 months for better data
- Verify regex is exact: copy-paste from this post
- Ensure “matches regex” is selected, not “contains”
- Wait 24-48 hours after setup for data processing
Problem: Seeing unexpected traffic spikes
Solutions:
- Check individual source breakdown in report
- Cross-reference with engagement metrics
- Look at landing pages – genuine AI traffic hits diverse content
Problem: Report shows no data after several weeks
Possible causes:
- Your content may not be indexed by AI tools yet
- Improve your SEO foundations – AI tools like Google and other search engines like unique and helpful content
